Cardiovascular diseases are among the most common serious illnesses affecting human health. CVDs may be prevented or mitigated by early diagnosis, and this may reduce mortality rates. Identifying risk factors using machine learning models is a promising approach. We would like to propose a model that incorporates different methods to achieve effective prediction of heart disease. For our proposed model to be successful, we have used efficient Data Collection, Data Pre-processing and Data Transformation methods to create accurate information for the training model. We have used a combined dataset (Cleveland, Long Beach VA, Switzerland, Hungarian and Stat log). Suitable features are selected by using the Relief, and Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) techniques. New hybrid classifiers like Decision Tree Bagging Method (DTBM), Random Forest Bagging Method (RFBM), K-Nearest Neighbors Bagging Method (KNNBM), AdaBoost Boosting Method (ABBM), and Gradient Boosting Boosting Method (GBBM) are developed by integrating the traditional classifiers with bagging and boosting methods, which are used in the training process. We have also instrumented some machine learning algorithms to calculate the Accuracy (ACC), Sensitivity (SEN), Error Rate, Precision (PRE) and F1 Score (F1) of our model, along with the Negative Predictive Value (NPR), False Positive Rate (FPR), and False Negative Rate (FNR). The results are shown separately to provide comparisons. Based on the result analysis, we can conclude that our proposed model produced the highest accuracy while using RFBM and Relief feature selection methods (99.05%).

Breast cancer is the most diagnosed cancer in Australia with crude incidence rates increasing drastically from 62.8 at ages 35-39 to 271.4 at ages 50-54 (cases per 100,000 women). Various researchers have proposed methods and tools based on Machine Learning and Convolutional Neural Networks for assessing mammographic images, but these methods have produced detection and interpretation errors resulting in false-positive and false-negative cases when used in the real world. We believe that this problem can potentially be resolved by implementing effective image pre-processing techniques to create training data for Deep-CNN. Therefore, the main aim of this research is to propose effective image preprocessing methods to create datasets that can save computational time for the neural network and improve accuracy and classification rates. To do so, this research proposes methods for background removal, pectoral muscle removal, adding noise to the images, and image enhancements. Adding noise without affecting the quality of details in the images makes the input images for the neural network more representative, which may improve the performance of the neural network model when used in the real world. The proposed method for background removal is the "Rolling Ball Algorithm" and "Huang's Fuzzy Thresholding", which succeed in removing background from 100% of the images. For pectoral muscle removal "Canny Edge Detection" and "Hough's Line Transform" are used, which removed muscle from 99.06% of the images. "Invert", "CTI_RAS" and "ISOCONTOUR" lookup tables (LUTs) were used for image enhancements to outline the ROIs and regions within the ROIs.

Background: Identification and treatment of breast cancer at an early stage can reduce mortality. Currently, mammography is the most widely used effective imaging technique in breast cancer detection. However, an erroneous mammogram based interpretation may result in false diagnosis rate, as distinguishing cancerous masses from adjacent tissue is often complex and error-prone. Methods: Six pre-trained and fine-tuned deep CNN architectures: VGG16, VGG19, MobileNetV2, ResNet50, DenseNet201, and InceptionV3 are evaluated to determine which model yields the best performance. We propose a BreastNet18 model using VGG16 as foundational base, since VGG16 performs with the highest accuracy. An ablation study is performed on BreastNet18, to evaluate its robustness and achieve the highest possible accuracy. Various image processing techniques with suitable parameter values are employed to remove artefacts and increase the image quality. A total dataset of 1442 preprocessed mammograms was augmented using seven augmentation techniques, resulting in a dataset of 11,536 images. To investigate possible overfitting issues, a k-fold cross validation is carried out. The model was then tested on noisy mammograms to evaluate its robustness. Results were compared with previous studies. Results: Proposed BreastNet18 model performed best with a training accuracy of 96.72%, a validating accuracy of 97.91%, and a test accuracy of 98.02%. In contrast to this, VGGNet19 yielded test accuracy of 96.24%, MobileNetV2 77.84%, ResNet50 79.98%, DenseNet201 86.92%, and InceptionV3 76.87%. Conclusions: Our proposed approach based on image processing, transfer learning, fine-tuning, and ablation study has demonstrated a high correct breast cancer classification while dealing with a limited number of complex medical images.

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Electronic Health Records (EHR) are the healthcare sector’s core digital strategy meant to improve the quality of care provided to patients. Despite the benefits afforded by this digital transformation initiative, adoption among healthcare organizations has been slower than desired. The sheer volume and sensitive nature of patient records compel these organizations to exercise a healthy amount of caution in implementing EHR. Cyberattacks have also increased the risks associated with non-optimal EHR implementations. An influx of high-profile data breaches has plagued the sector during the COVID-19 pandemic, which put the spotlight on EHR cybersecurity. One objective of this research project is to aid the acceleration of EHR adoption. Another objective is to ensure the robustness of the system to resist malicious attacks. For the former, a systematic review was used to unearth all the possible causes why the adoption of EHR has been anemic. In this paper, sixty-five existing proposed EHR solutions were analyzed and it was found that there are fourteen major challenges that need to be addressed to reduce friction and risk for health organizations. These were privacy, security, confidentiality, interoperability, access control, scalability, authentication, accessibility, availability, data storage, data ownership, data validity, data integrity, and ease of use. We propose EHRChain, a new framework that tackles all the listed challenges simultaneously to address the first objective while also being designed to achieve the second objective. It is enabled by dual-blockchains based on Hyperledger Sawtooth to allow patient data decentralization via a consortium blockchain and IPFS for distributed data storage.