Advanced cervical cancer classification: enhancing pap smear images with hybrid PMD Filter-CLAHE

Cervical cancer remains a significant health problem, especially in developing countries. Early detection is critical for effective treatment. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have shown promise in automated cervical cancer screening, but their performance depends on Pap smear image quality. This study investigates the impact of various image preprocessing techniques on CNN performance for cervical cancer classification using the SIPaKMeD dataset. Three preprocessing techniques were evaluated: perona-malik diffusion (PMD) filter for noise reduction, contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) for image contrast enhancement, and the proposed hybrid PMD filter-CLAHE approach. The enhanced image datasets were evaluated on pretrained models, such as ResNet-34, ResNet-50, SqueezeNet-1.0, MobileNet-V2, EfficientNet-B0, EfficientNet-B1, DenseNet-121, and DenseNet-201. The results show that hybrid preprocessing PMD filter-CLAHE can improve the Pap smear image quality and CNN architecture performance compared to the original images. The maximum metric improvements are 13.62% for accuracy, 10.04% for precision, 13.08% for recall, and 14.34% for F1-score. The proposed hybrid PMD filter-CLAHE technique offers a new perspective in improving cervical cancer classification performance using CNN architectures.

Evaluating Sensitivity Parameters in Smartphone-Based Gaze Estimation: A Comparative Study of Appearance-Based and Infrared Eye Trackers

This study evaluates a smartphone-based, deep-learning eye-tracking algorithm by comparing its performance against a commercial infrared-based eye tracker, the Tobii Pro Nano. The aim is to investigate the feasibility of appearance-based gaze estimation under realistic mobile usage conditions. Key sensitivity factors, including age, gender, vision correction, lighting conditions, device type, and head position, were systematically analysed. The appearance-based algorithm integrates a lightweight convolutional neural network (MobileNet-V3) with a recurrent structure (Long Short-Term Memory) to predict gaze coordinates from grayscale facial images. Gaze data were collected from 51 participants using dynamic visual stimuli, and accuracy was measured using Euclidean distance. The deep learning model produced a mean error of 17.76 mm, compared to 16.53 mm for the Tobii Pro Nano. While overall accuracy differences were small, the deep learning-based method was more sensitive to factors such as lighting, vision correction, and age, with higher failure rates observed under low-light conditions among participants using glasses and in older age groups. Device-specific and positional factors also influenced tracking performance. These results highlight the potential of appearance-based approaches for mobile eye tracking and offer a reference framework for evaluating gaze estimation systems across varied usage conditions.

An Explainable Deep Learning Framework for Brain Stroke and Tumor Progression via MRI Interpretation

Early and accurate detection of brain abnormalities, such as tumors and strokes, is essential for timely intervention and improved patient outcomes. In this study, we present a deep learning-based system capable of identifying both brain tumors and strokes from MRI images, along with their respective stages. We have executed two groundbreaking strategies involving convolutional neural networks, MobileNet V2 and ResNet-50-optimized through transfer learning to classify MRI scans into five diagnostic categories. Our dataset, aggregated and augmented from various publicly available MRI sources, was carefully curated to ensure class balance and image diversity. To enhance model generalization and prevent overfitting, we applied dropout layers and extensive data augmentation. The models achieved strong performance, with training accuracy reaching 93\% and validation accuracy up to 88\%. While ResNet-50 demonstrated slightly better results, Mobile Net V2 remains a promising option for real-time diagnosis in low resource settings due to its lightweight architecture. This research offers a practical AI-driven solution for early brain abnormality detection, with potential for clinical deployment and future enhancement through larger datasets and multi modal inputs.

Intelligent Incident Hypertension Prediction in Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a significant risk factor for hypertension, primarily due to intermittent hypoxia and sleep fragmentation. Predicting whether individuals with OSA will develop hypertension within five years remains a complex challenge. This study introduces a novel deep learning approach that integrates Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT)-based transfer learning to enhance prediction accuracy. We are the first to incorporate all polysomnography signals together for hypertension prediction, leveraging their collective information to improve model performance. Features were extracted from these signals and transformed into a 2D representation to utilize pre-trained 2D neural networks such as MobileNet, EfficientNet, and ResNet variants. To further improve feature learning, we introduced a DCT layer, which transforms input features into a frequency-based representation, preserving essential spectral information, decorrelating features, and enhancing robustness to noise. This frequency-domain approach, coupled with transfer learning, is especially beneficial for limited medical datasets, as it leverages rich representations from pre-trained networks to improve generalization. By strategically placing the DCT layer at deeper truncation depths within EfficientNet, our model achieved a best area under the curve (AUC) of 72.88%, demonstrating the effectiveness of frequency-domain feature extraction and transfer learning in predicting hypertension risk in OSA patients over a five-year period.

TrustSkin: A Fairness Pipeline for Trustworthy Facial Affect Analysis Across Skin Tone

Understanding how facial affect analysis (FAA) systems perform across different demographic groups requires reliable measurement of sensitive attributes such as ancestry, often approximated by skin tone, which itself is highly influenced by lighting conditions. This study compares two objective skin tone classification methods: the widely used Individual Typology Angle (ITA) and a perceptually grounded alternative based on Lightness ($L^*$) and Hue ($H^*$). Using AffectNet and a MobileNet-based model, we assess fairness across skin tone groups defined by each method. Results reveal a severe underrepresentation of dark skin tones ($\sim 2 \%$), alongside fairness disparities in F1-score (up to 0.08) and TPR (up to 0.11) across groups. While ITA shows limitations due to its sensitivity to lighting, the $H^*$-$L^*$ method yields more consistent subgrouping and enables clearer diagnostics through metrics such as Equal Opportunity. Grad-CAM analysis further highlights differences in model attention patterns by skin tone, suggesting variation in feature encoding. To support future mitigation efforts, we also propose a modular fairness-aware pipeline that integrates perceptual skin tone estimation, model interpretability, and fairness evaluation. These findings emphasize the relevance of skin tone measurement choices in fairness assessment and suggest that ITA-based evaluations may overlook disparities affecting darker-skinned individuals.

Automatic Complementary Separation Pruning Toward Lightweight CNNs

In this paper, we present Automatic Complementary Separation Pruning (ACSP), a novel and fully automated pruning method for convolutional neural networks. ACSP integrates the strengths of both structured pruning and activation-based pruning, enabling the efficient removal of entire components such as neurons and channels while leveraging activations to identify and retain the most relevant components. Our approach is designed specifically for supervised learning tasks, where we construct a graph space that encodes the separation capabilities of each component with respect to all class pairs. By employing complementary selection principles and utilizing a clustering algorithm, ACSP ensures that the selected components maintain diverse and complementary separation capabilities, reducing redundancy and maintaining high network performance. The method automatically determines the optimal subset of components in each layer, utilizing a knee-finding algorithm to select the minimal subset that preserves performance without requiring user-defined pruning volumes. Extensive experiments on multiple architectures, including VGG-16, ResNet-50, and MobileNet-V2, across datasets like CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-1K, demonstrate that ACSP achieves competitive accuracy compared to other methods while significantly reducing computational costs. This fully automated approach not only enhances scalability but also makes ACSP especially practical for real-world deployment by eliminating the need for manually defining the pruning volume.

Towards Lightweight Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution with Depthwise Separable Dilated Convolutional Network

Deep neural networks have demonstrated highly competitive performance in super-resolution (SR) for natural images by learning mappings from low-resolution (LR) to high-resolution (HR) images. However, hyperspectral super-resolution remains an ill-posed problem due to the high spectral dimensionality of the data and the scarcity of available training samples. Moreover, existing methods often rely on large models with a high number of parameters or require the fusion with panchromatic or RGB images, both of which are often impractical in real-world scenarios. Inspired by the MobileNet architecture, we introduce a lightweight depthwise separable dilated convolutional network (DSDCN) to address the aforementioned challenges. Specifically, our model leverages multiple depthwise separable convolutions, similar to the MobileNet architecture, and further incorporates a dilated convolution fusion block to make the model more flexible for the extraction of both spatial and spectral features. In addition, we propose a custom loss function that combines mean squared error (MSE), an L2 norm regularization-based constraint, and a spectral angle-based loss, ensuring the preservation of both spectral and spatial details. The proposed model achieves very competitive performance on two publicly available hyperspectral datasets, making it well-suited for hyperspectral image super-resolution tasks. The source codes are publicly available at: \href{https://github.com/Usman1021/lightweight}{https://github.com/Usman1021/lightweight}.

ArrhythmiaVision: Resource-Conscious Deep Learning Models with Visual Explanations for ECG Arrhythmia Classification

Cardiac arrhythmias are a leading cause of life-threatening cardiac events, highlighting the urgent need for accurate and timely detection. Electrocardiography (ECG) remains the clinical gold standard for arrhythmia diagnosis; however, manual interpretation is time-consuming, dependent on clinical expertise, and prone to human error. Although deep learning has advanced automated ECG analysis, many existing models abstract away the signal's intrinsic temporal and morphological features, lack interpretability, and are computationally intensive-hindering their deployment on resource-constrained platforms. In this work, we propose two novel lightweight 1D convolutional neural networks, ArrhythmiNet V1 and V2, optimized for efficient, real-time arrhythmia classification on edge devices. Inspired by MobileNet's depthwise separable convolutional design, these models maintain memory footprints of just 302.18 KB and 157.76 KB, respectively, while achieving classification accuracies of 0.99 (V1) and 0.98 (V2) on the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Dataset across five classes: Normal Sinus Rhythm, Left Bundle Branch Block, Right Bundle Branch Block, Atrial Premature Contraction, and Premature Ventricular Contraction. In order to ensure clinical transparency and relevance, we integrate Shapley Additive Explanations and Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping, enabling both local and global interpretability. These techniques highlight physiologically meaningful patterns such as the QRS complex and T-wave that contribute to the model's predictions. We also discuss performance-efficiency trade-offs and address current limitations related to dataset diversity and generalizability. Overall, our findings demonstrate the feasibility of combining interpretability, predictive accuracy, and computational efficiency in practical, wearable, and embedded ECG monitoring systems.

TeleSparse: Practical Privacy-Preserving Verification of Deep Neural Networks

Verification of the integrity of deep learning inference is crucial for understanding whether a model is being applied correctly. However, such verification typically requires access to model weights and (potentially sensitive or private) training data. So-called Zero-knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge (ZK-SNARKs) would appear to provide the capability to verify model inference without access to such sensitive data. However, applying ZK-SNARKs to modern neural networks, such as transformers and large vision models, introduces significant computational overhead. We present TeleSparse, a ZK-friendly post-processing mechanisms to produce practical solutions to this problem. TeleSparse tackles two fundamental challenges inherent in applying ZK-SNARKs to modern neural networks: (1) Reducing circuit constraints: Over-parameterized models result in numerous constraints for ZK-SNARK verification, driving up memory and proof generation costs. We address this by applying sparsification to neural network models, enhancing proof efficiency without compromising accuracy or security. (2) Minimizing the size of lookup tables required for non-linear functions, by optimizing activation ranges through neural teleportation, a novel adaptation for narrowing activation functions' range. TeleSparse reduces prover memory usage by 67% and proof generation time by 46% on the same model, with an accuracy trade-off of approximately 1%. We implement our framework using the Halo2 proving system and demonstrate its effectiveness across multiple architectures (Vision-transformer, ResNet, MobileNet) and datasets (ImageNet,CIFAR-10,CIFAR-100). This work opens new directions for ZK-friendly model design, moving toward scalable, resource-efficient verifiable deep learning.

A BERT-Style Self-Supervised Learning CNN for Disease Identification from Retinal Images

In the field of medical imaging, the advent of deep learning, especially the application of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has revolutionized the analysis and interpretation of medical images. Nevertheless, deep learning methods usually rely on large amounts of labeled data. In medical imaging research, the acquisition of high-quality labels is both expensive and difficult. The introduction of Vision Transformers (ViT) and self-supervised learning provides a pre-training strategy that utilizes abundant unlabeled data, effectively alleviating the label acquisition challenge while broadening the breadth of data utilization. However, ViT's high computational density and substantial demand for computing power, coupled with the lack of localization characteristics of its operations on image patches, limit its efficiency and applicability in many application scenarios. In this study, we employ nn-MobileNet, a lightweight CNN framework, to implement a BERT-style self-supervised learning approach. We pre-train the network on the unlabeled retinal fundus images from the UK Biobank to improve downstream application performance. We validate the results of the pre-trained model on Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD), and various retinal diseases identification. The results show that our approach can significantly improve performance in the downstream tasks. In summary, this study combines the benefits of CNNs with the capabilities of advanced self-supervised learning in handling large-scale unlabeled data, demonstrating the potential of CNNs in the presence of label scarcity.