HyCARD-Net: A Synergistic Hybrid Intelligence Framework for Cardiovascular Disease Diagnosis

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains the foremost cause of mortality worldwide, underscoring the urgent need for intelligent and data-driven diagnostic tools. Traditional predictive models often struggle to generalize across heterogeneous datasets and complex physiological patterns. To address this, we propose a hybrid ensemble framework that integrates deep learning architectures, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), with classical machine learning algorithms, including K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB), using an ensemble voting mechanism. This approach combines the representational power of deep networks with the interpretability and efficiency of traditional models. Experiments on two publicly available Kaggle datasets demonstrate that the proposed model achieves superior performance, reaching 82.30 percent accuracy on Dataset I and 97.10 percent on Dataset II, with consistent gains in precision, recall, and F1-score. These findings underscore the robustness and clinical potential of hybrid AI frameworks for predicting cardiovascular disease and facilitating early intervention. Furthermore, this study directly supports the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3 (Good Health and Well-being) by promoting early diagnosis, prevention, and management of non-communicable diseases through innovative, data-driven healthcare solutions.