Narmine ElHakim

JAIT is a scientific open access journal which focuses on empirical research results and critical analysis of technology development, use, management and impacts in information technology.

Parkinson’s disease is the second-most common cause of death and disability as well as the most prevalent neurological disorder. In the last 15 years, the number of cases of PD has doubled. The accurate detection of PD in the early stages is one of the most challenging tasks to ensure individuals can continue to live with as little interference as possible. Yet there are not enough trained neurologists around the world to detect Parkinson’s disease in its early stages. Machine learning methods based on Artificial intelligence have acquired a lot of popularity over the past few decades in medical disease detection. However, these methods do not provide an accurate and timely diagnosis. The overall detection accuracy of machine learning-related models is inadequate. This study collected data from 31 male and female patients, including 195 voices. Approximately six recordings were created per patient, with the length of each recording extending from 1 to 36 s. These voices were recorded in a soundproof studio using an Industrial Acoustics Company (IAC) AKG-C420 head-mounted microphone. The data set was collected to investigate the diagnostic significance of speech and voice abnormalities caused by Parkinson’s disease. An imbalanced dataset is the main contributor of model overfitting and generalization errors, and hence one class has the majority of samples and the other class has minority samples. This problem is addressed in this study by utilizing the three sampling techniques. After balancing the datasets, each class has the same number of samples, which has proven valuable in improving the model’s performance and reducing the overfitting problem. Four performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall and f1 score are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid model. Experiments demonstrated that the proposed model achieved 100% accuracy, recall and f1 score using the balanced dataset with the random oversampling technique and 100% precision, 97% recall, 99% AUC score and 91% f1 score with the SMOTE technique.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a fatal disease in developing countries, with the infection spreading through direct contact or the air. Despite its seriousness, the early detection of tuberculosis by means of reliable techniques can save the patients’ lives. A chest X-ray is a recommended screening technique for locating pulmonary abnormalities. However, analyzing the X-ray images to detect abnormalities requires highly experienced radiologists. Therefore, artificial intelligence techniques come into play to help radiologists to perform an accurate diagnosis at the early stages of TB disease. Hence, this study focuses on applying two AI techniques, CNN and ANN. Furthermore, this study proposes two different approaches with two systems each to diagnose tuberculosis from two datasets. The first approach hybridizes two CNN models, which are Res-Net-50 and GoogLeNet techniques. Prior to the classification stage, the approach applies the principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm to reduce the features’ dimensionality, aiming to extract the deep features. Then, the SVM algorithm is used for classifying features with high accuracy. This hybrid approach achieved superior results in diagnosing tuberculosis based on X-ray images from both datasets. In contrast, the second approach applies artificial neural networks (ANN) based on the fused features extracted by ResNet-50 and GoogleNet models and combines them with the features extracted by the gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM), discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and local binary pattern (LBP) algorithms. ANN achieved superior results for the two tuberculosis datasets. When using the first dataset, the ANN, with ResNet-50, GLCM, DWT and LBP features, achieved an accuracy of 99.2%, a sensitivity of 99.23%, a specificity of 99.41%, and an AUC of 99.78%. Meanwhile, with the second dataset, ANN, with the features of ResNet-50, GLCM, DWT and LBP, reached an accuracy of 99.8%, a sensitivity of 99.54%, a specificity of 99.68%, and an AUC of 99.82%. Thus, the proposed methods help doctors and radiologists to diagnose tuberculosis early and increase chances of survival.

Blockchain technology is a sustainable technology that offers a high level of security for many industrial applications. Blockchain has numerous benefits, such as decentralisation, immutability and tamper-proofing. Blockchain is composed of two processes, namely, mining (the process of adding a new block or transaction to the global public ledger created by the previous block) and validation (the process of validating the new block added). Several consensus protocols have been introduced to validate blockchain transactions, Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS), which are crucial to cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. However, these consensus protocols are vulnerable to double-spending attacks. Amongst these attacks, the 51% attack is the most prominent because it involves forking a blockchain to conduct double spending. Many attempts have been made to solve this issue, and examples include delayed proof-of-work (PoW) and several Byzantine fault tolerance mechanisms. These attempts, however, suffer from delay issues and unsorted block sequences. This study proposes a hybrid algorithm that combines PoS and PoW mechanisms to provide a fair mining reward to the miner/validator by conducting forking to combine PoW and PoS consensuses. As demonstrated by the experimental results, the proposed algorithm can reduce the possibility of intruders performing double mining because it requires achieving 100% dominance in the network, which is impossible.