Athanasios Kallipolitis

Vitiligo, alopecia areata, atopic, and stasis dermatitis are common skin conditions that pose diagnostic and assessment challenges. Skin image analysis is a promising noninvasive approach for objective and automated detection as well as quantitative assessment of skin diseases. This review provides a systematic literature search regarding the analysis of computer vision techniques applied to these benign skin conditions, following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. The review examines deep learning architectures and image processing algorithms for segmentation, feature extraction, and classification tasks employed for disease detection. It also focuses on practical applications, emphasizing quantitative disease assessment, and the performance of various computer vision approaches for each condition while highlighting their strengths and limitations. Finally, the review denotes the need for disease-specific datasets with curated annotations and suggests future directions toward unsupervised or self-supervised approaches. Additionally, the findings underscore the importance of developing accurate, automated tools for disease severity score calculation to improve ML-based monitoring and diagnosis in dermatology. Not applicable.

Apart from providing user-friendly applications that support digitized healthcare routines, the use of wearable devices has proven to increase the independence of patients in a healthcare setting. By applying machine learning techniques to real health-related data, important conclusions can be drawn for unsolved issues related to disease prognosis. In this paper, various machine learning techniques are examined and analyzed for the provision of personalized care to COVID-19 patients with mild symptoms based on individual characteristics and the comorbidities they have, while the connection between the stimuli and predictive results are utilized for the evaluation of the system’s transparency. The results, jointly analyzing wearable and electronic health record data for the prediction of a daily dyspnea grade and the duration of fever, are promising in terms of evaluation metrics even in a specified stratum of patients. The interpretability scheme provides useful insight concerning factors that greatly influenced the results. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the use of wearable devices for remote monitoring through cloud platforms is feasible while providing awareness of a patient’s condition, leading to the early detection of undesired changes and reduced visits for patient screening.

Clinical characteristics of COVID-19 patients have been mostly described in hospitalised patients, yet most are managed in an outpatient setting. The COVID-19 pandemic transformed healthcare delivery models and accelerated the implementation and adoption of telemedicine solutions. We employed a modular remote monitoring system with multi-modal data collection, aggregation, and analytics features to monitor mild COVID-19 patients and report their characteristics and symptoms. At enrolment, the patients were equipped with wearables, which were associated with their accounts, provided the respective in-system consents, and, in parallel, reported the demographics and patient characteristics. The patients monitored their vitals and symptoms daily during a 14-day monitoring period. Vital signs were entered either manually or automatically through wearables. We enrolled 162 patients from February to May 2022. The median age was 51 (42–60) years; 44% were male, 22% had at least one comorbidity, and 73.5% were fully vaccinated. The vitals of the patients were within normal range throughout the monitoring period. Thirteen patients were asymptomatic, while the rest had at least one symptom for a median of 11 (7–16) days. Fatigue was the most common symptom, followed by fever and cough. Loss of taste and smell was the longest-lasting symptom. Age positively correlated with the duration of fatigue, anorexia, and low-grade fever. Comorbidities, the number of administered doses, the days since the last dose, and the days since the positive test did not seem to affect the number of sick days or symptomatology. The i-COVID platform allowed us to provide remote monitoring and reporting of COVID-19 outpatients. We were able to report their clinical characteristics while simultaneously helping reduce the spread of the virus through hospitals by minimising hospital visits. The monitoring platform also offered advanced knowledge extraction and analytic capabilities to detect health condition deterioration and automatically trigger personalised support workflows.

Along with the increase in the accuracy of artificial intelligence systems, complexity has also risen. Despite high accuracy, high-risk decision-making requires explanations about the model’s decision, which often take the form of saliency maps. This work examines the efficacy of ensembling deep convolutional neural networks to leverage explanations, under the concept that ensemble models are combinatory informed. A novel approach is presented for aggregating saliency maps derived from multiple base models, as an alternative way of combining the different perspectives that several competent models offer. The proposed methodology lowers computation costs, while allowing for the combinations of maps of various origins. Following a saliency map evaluation scheme, four tests are performed over three image datasets, two medical image datasets and one generic. The results suggest that interpretability is improved by combining information through the aggregation scheme. The discussion that follows provides insights into the inner workings behind the results, such as the specific combination of the interpretability and ensemble methods, and offers useful suggestions for future work.