Chiara Verdone

Atrial fibrillation is the most prevalent sustained cardiac arrhythmia and a major risk factor for stroke, heart failure, and premature mortality. Automatic detection remains challenging due to the variability of electrocardiogram (ECG) morphology, noise, and the paroxysmal nature of atrial fibrillation events. This study proposes a comprehensive framework that integrates optimised segmentation, feature extraction, and advanced deep learning architectures to improve detection accuracy. A coalescence window is introduced to dynamically cluster arrhythmic episodes, aligning computational analysis with clinical event distributions. Multiple classifiers are investigated, ranging from traditional machine learning models to state-of-the-art deep neural networks, including Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM). Experimental evaluation on a balanced dataset of ECG signals demonstrates the superior performance of deep learning models, with the best architecture achieving high accuracy and F1-score, significantly outperforming traditional approaches. Furthermore, the proposed pipeline is designed to be modular and resource-aware, supporting potential deployment in real-time and edge computing environments. These results highlight the feasibility of scalable atrial fibrillation monitoring systems that bridge algorithmic innovation with clinical applicability, ultimately contributing to earlier diagnosis and improved patient management.

Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative condition primarily affecting the elderly but also occurring in younger individuals. It is caused by a progressive loss of nerve cells in the brain’s substantia nigra that release dopamine, essential for controlling movements. Dopamine deficiency results in symptoms affecting both motor and non-motor functions, which vary among individuals. Diagnosis relies on clinical symptoms and medical history, often supported by brain scans, as there is no specific diagnostic test available. Diagnosis is challenging due to vague initial symptoms resembling other conditions. Current research indicates that AI can significantly enhance data and image analysis, aiding in the diagnosis and monitoring of PD progression. To this aim, this study proposes a hybrid model allowing the integrated use of clinical data and single photon emission computed tomography images of a patient to predict the presence of the disease. The approach consists of a combination of two types of neural networks, an LSTM for clinical data and a CNN for images. The validation is performed on a widely validated dataset belonging to the Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative, from which the data recording visits of 1,814 patients were extracted. The obtained results are interesting and useful to address further investigations.

We investigated the possibility of using Raman spectroscopy assisted by artificial intelligence methods to identify liver cancer cells and distinguish them from their Non-Tumor counterpart. To this aim, primary liver cells (40 Tumor and 40 Non-Tumor cells) obtained from resected hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) tumor tissue and the adjacent non-tumor area (negative control) were analyzed by Raman micro-spectroscopy. Preliminarily, the cells were analyzed morphologically and spectrally. Then, three machine learning approaches, including multivariate models and neural networks, were simultaneously investigated and successfully used to analyze the cells’ Raman data. The results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted Raman spectroscopy for Tumor cell classification and prediction with an accuracy of nearly 90% of correct predictions on a single spectrum.

Heart disease is today the leading cause of death in the world. The early diagnosis can significantly reduce the risk of death and can be useful to drive successful treatment. However, the early diagnosis requires continuous monitoring of a large set of clinical and lifestyle indicators.This is the reason why there is an increasing number of studies aimed to adopt machine learning to predict heart disease starting from the analysis of the vast range of clinical data that we can collect today thanks to the advent of patients’ digital folders. This work investigates the adoption of a large set of machine learning and deep learning classifiers to predict heart disease from the data gathered by a proposed feature model. The study also proposes hyperparameters optimizations aimed to improve the performance of the adopted classifiers. The evaluation is performed on a real dataset and the obtained results show good performance.