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Background Ovarian cancer is the fifth leading cause of mortality among women in the United States. Ovarian cancer is also known as forgotten cancer or silent disease. The survival of ovarian cancer patients depends on several factors, including the treatment process and the prognosis. Methods The ovarian cancer patients’ dataset is compiled from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database. With the help of a clinician, the dataset is curated, and the most relevant features are selected. Pearson’s second coefficient of skewness test is used to evaluate the skewness of the dataset. Pearson correlation coefficient is also used to investigate the associations between features. Statistical test is utilized to evaluate the significance of the features. Six Machine Learning (ML) models, including K-Nearest Neighbors , Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost), and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), are implemented for survival prediction in both classification and regression approaches. An interpretable method, Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP), is applied to clarify the decision-making process and determine the importance of each feature in prediction. Additionally, DTs of the RF model are displayed to show how the model predicts the survival intervals. Results Our results show that RF (Accuracy = 88.72%, AUC = 82.38%) and XGBoost (Root Mean Squad Error (RMSE)) = 20.61%, R2 = 0.4667) have the best performance for classification and regression approaches, respectively. Furthermore, using the SHAP method along with extracted DTs of the RF model, the most important features in the dataset are identified. Histologic type ICD-O-3, chemotherapy recode, year of diagnosis, age at diagnosis, tumor stage, and grade are the most important determinant factors in survival prediction. Conclusion To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first study that develops various ML models to predict ovarian cancer patients’ survival on the SEER database in both classification and regression approaches. These ML algorithms also achieve more accurate results and outperform statistical methods. Furthermore, our study is the first study to use the SHAP method to increase confidence and transparency of the proposed models’ prediction for clinicians. Moreover, our developed models, as an automated auxiliary tool, can help clinicians to have a better understanding of the estimated survival as well as important features that affect survival.

Purpose: Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19), first reported in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, has become a pandemic. Chest imaging is used for the diagnosis of Covid-19 patients and can address problems concerning Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) shortcomings. Chest X-ray images can act as an appropriate alternative to Computed Tomography (CT) for diagnosing Covid-19. The purpose of this study is to use a Deep Learning method for diagnosing Covid-19 cases using chest X-ray images. Thus, we propose Covidense based on the pre-trained Densenet-201 model and is trained on a dataset comprising chest X-ray images of Covid-19, normal, bacterial pneumonia, and viral pneumonia cases. Materials and Methods: In this study, a total number of 1280 chest X-ray images of Covid-19, normal, bacterial and viral pneumonia cases were collected from open access repositories. Covidense, a convolutional neural network model, is based on the pre-trained DenseNet-201 architecture, and after pre-processing the images, it has been trained and tested on the images using the 5-fold cross-validation method. Results: The accuracy of different classifications including classification of two classes (Covid-19, normal), three classes 1 (Covid-19, normal and bacterial pneumonia), three classes 2 (Covid-19, normal and viral pneumonia), and four classes (Covid-19, normal, bacterial pneumonia and viral pneumonia) are 99.46%, 92.86%, 93.91 %, and 91.01% respectively. Conclusion: This model can differentiate pneumonia caused by Covid-19 from other types of pneumonia, including bacterial and viral. The proposed model offers high accuracy and can be of great help for effective screening. Thus, reducing the rate of infection spread. Also, it can act as a complementary tool for the detection and diagnosis of Covid-19.

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Background In May 2022, the World Health Organization (WHO) European Region announced an atypical Monkeypox epidemic in response to reports of numerous cases in some member countries unrelated to those where the illness is endemic. This issue has raised concerns about the widespread nature of this disease around the world. The experience with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has increased awareness about pandemics among researchers and health authorities. Methods Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have shown promising performance in detecting COVID-19 and predicting its outcomes. As a result, researchers have begun applying similar methods to detect Monkeypox disease. In this study, we utilize a dataset comprising skin images of three diseases: Monkeypox, Chickenpox, Measles, and Normal cases. We develop seven DNN models to identify Monkeypox from these images. Two scenarios of including two classes and four classes are implemented. Results The results show that our proposed DenseNet201-based architecture has the best performance, with Accuracy = 97.63%, F1-Score = 90.51%, and Area Under Curve (AUC) = 94.27% in two-class scenario; and Accuracy = 95.18%, F1-Score = 89.61%, AUC = 92.06% for four-class scenario. Comparing our study with previous studies with similar scenarios, shows that our proposed model demonstrates superior performance, particularly in terms of the F1-Score metric. For the sake of transparency and explainability, Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) and Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-Cam) were developed to interpret the results. These techniques aim to provide insights into the decision-making process, thereby increasing the trust of clinicians. Conclusion The DenseNet201 model outperforms the other models in terms of the confusion metrics, regardless of the scenario. One significant accomplishment of this study is the utilization of LIME and Grad-Cam to identify the affected areas and assess their significance in diagnosing diseases based on skin images. By incorporating these techniques, we enhance our understanding of the infected regions and their relevance in distinguishing Monkeypox from other similar diseases. Our proposed model can serve as a valuable auxiliary tool for diagnosing Monkeypox and distinguishing it from other related conditions.