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Understanding clinical features and risk factors associated with COVID-19 mortality is needed to early identify critically ill patients, initiate treatments and prevent mortality. A retrospective study on COVID-19 patients referred to a tertiary hospital in Iran between March and November 2020 was conducted. COVID-19-related mortality and its association with clinical features including headache, chest pain, symptoms on computerized tomography (CT), hospitalization, time to infection, history of neurological disorders, having a single or multiple risk factors, fever, myalgia, dizziness, seizure, abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea and anorexia were investigated. Based on the investigation outcome, decision tree and dimension reduction algorithms were used to identify the aforementioned risk factors. Of the 3008 patients (mean age 59.3 ± 18.7 years, 44% women) with COVID-19, 373 died. There was a significant association between COVID-19 mortality and old age, headache, chest pain, low respiratory rate, oxygen saturation

One of the most common forms of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease (AD), which leads to progressive mental deterioration. Unfortunately, there is no definitive diagnosis and cure that can stop the condition progressing. The diagnosis is often performed based on the clinical history and neuropsychological data, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Deep neural networks (DNN) algorithms are gaining popularity for medical diagnosis, and have been used widely for the analysis of MRI data. DNNs can extract hidden features from thousands of training images automatically. However, they cannot judge how confident they are about their predictions. To use DNNs in safety-critical applications such as medical diagnosis, uncertainty quantification of DNNs predictions is crucial. For this purpose, Monte Carlo dropout (MCD) has been widely used, however, it may lead to overconfident and miss calibrated results. This paper proposes a framework in which the MCD algorithm’s hyper-parameters are optimized during training using Bayesian optimization for the first time. The conducted optimization leads to assigning high predictive entropy to erroneous predictions and making it possible to recognize risky predictions. The proposed framework is used for AD diagnosis, which has not been done before. We compare our method with some existing methods in the literature based on different uncertainty quantification criteria. The results of comprehensive experiments on the Kaggle dataset using a deep model pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset show that the proposed algorithm can quantify uncertainty much better than the existing methods.

Predicting treatment outcomes in traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients is challenging worldwide. The present study aimed to achieve the most accurate machine learning algorithms to predict the outcomes of TBI treatment by evaluating demographic features, laboratory data, imaging indices, and clinical features. We used data from 3347 patients admitted to a tertiary trauma centre in Iran from 2016 to 2021. After the exclusion of incomplete data, 1653 patients remained. We used machine learning algorithms such as Random Forest (RF) and Decision Tree (DT) with ten-fold cross-validation to develop the best prediction model. Our findings reveal that among different variables included in this study, the motor component of the Glasgow Coma Scale, condition of pupils, and condition of cisterns were the most reliable features for predicting in-hospital mortality, while the patients’ age takes the place of cisterns condition when considering the long-term survival of TBI patients. Also, we found that the RF algorithm is the best model to predict the short-term mortality of TBI patients. However, the generalized linear model (GLM) algorithm had the best performance (with an accuracy rate of 82.03 ± 2.34) in predicting the long-term survival of patients. Our results showed that using appropriate markers, and machine learning algorithms can provide a reliable prediction of TBI patients’ survival in the short- and long-term with reliable and easily accessible features of patients.

This study aimed to investigate the association between regional body fat distribution and the prevalence of Diabetes mellitus (DM) in adult populations using machine learning. We applied machine learning methods to data from a cohort study to analyze the relationship between fat in different body areas and diabetes. All measurement was done by "Tanita Segmental Body Composition Analyzer BC-418 MA Tanita Corp, Japan". The correlation between the used parameters and DM was measured using some machine learning algorithms i.e. SVM, SGD, KNN, MLP, Adaboost and EDINet. A total of 4661 participants were included. The top features that reported higher importance in classification models were age, fat mass, and percentages in legs, arms, and trunk area. Fat-free mass in the legs, arm, and trunk area was reversely associated with diabetes. Our proposed method significantly outperformed the others. It has the best performances in Accuracy, Precision, Recall-0, Recall-1, and F1-score, which were 93.57, 93.67, 96.11, 74.55 and 93.62, respectively. Our machine learning models showed that regional body fat could have specific impacts on diabetes based on the location of the fat accumulation. The most predictor values of diabetes were age, fat mass, and percentages in arms, legs, and trunk area. Further studies on different ages, gender, ethnic groups, and races are recommended.

Genetic Network Programming (GNP) is a relatively recently proposed evolutionary algorithm which is an extension of Genetic Programming (GP). However, individuals in GNP have graph structures. This algorithm is mainly used in decision making process of agent control problems. It uses a graph to make a flowchart and use this flowchart as a decision making strategy that an agent must follow to achieve the goal. One of the most important weaknesses of this algorithm is that crossover and mutation break the structures of individuals during the evolution process. Although it can lead to better structures, this may break suitable ones and increase the time needed to achieve optimal solutions. Meanwhile, all the researches in this field are dedicated to test GNP in deterministic environments. However, most of the real-world problems are stochastic and this is another issue that should be addressed. In this research, we try to find a mechanism that GNP shows better performance in stochastic environments. In order to achieve this goal, the evolution process of GNP was modified. In the proposed method, the experience of promising individuals was saved in consecutive generations. Then, to generate offspring in some predefined number of generations, the saved experiences were used instead of crossover and mutation. The experimental results of the proposed method were compared with GNP and some of its versions in both deterministic and stochastic environments. The results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method in both deterministic and stochastic environments.

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) can lead to serious cardiac problems. HCM is often diagnosed by an expert using cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) images obtained from patients. In this research, we aimed to develop a deep learning technique to automate HCM diagnosis. CMR images of 37421 healthy and 21846 HCM patients were obtained during two years. Images obtained from female patients form 53% of the collected dataset. The mean and standard deviation of the dataset patients’ age are 48.2 and 19.5 years, respectively. Three experts inspected images and determined whether a case has HCM or not. New data augmentation was used to generate new images by employing color filtering on the existing ones. To classify the augmented images, we used a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time CNN is used for HCM diagnosis. We designed our CNN from scratch to reach acceptable diagnosis accuracy. Comparing the designed algorithm output with the experts’ opinions, the method could achieve accuracy of 95.23%, recall of 97.90%, and specificity of 93.06% on the original dataset. The same performance metrics for the designed algorithm on the augmented dataset were 98.53%, 98.70%, and 95.21%, respectively. We have also experimented with different optimizers (e.g. Adadelta and Adagrad) and other data augmentation methods (e.g. height shift and rotation) to further evaluate the proposed method. Using our data augmentation method, accuracy of 98.53% were achieved which is higher than the best accuracy (95.83%) obtained by the other data augmentation methods which have been evaluated. The upper bound on difference between true error rate and empirical error rate of the proposed method has also been provided in order to present better performance analysis. The advantages of employing the proposed method are elimination of contrast agent and its complications, decreased CMR examination time, lower costs for patients and cardiac imaging centers.

Background: To reduce mortality in hospitalized patients with COVID-19 and cardiovascular disease (CVD), it is necessary to understand the relationship between patient’s symptoms, risk factors, and comorbidities with their mortality rate. Method: To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first which takes into account the determinants like risk factors, symptoms and comorbidities leading to mortality in CVD patients who are hospitalized with COVID-19. This study was conducted on 6600 hospitalized patients with CVD and COVID-19 recruited between January 2020 and January 2021 in Iran. All patients were diagnosed with previous history of CVD like angina, myocardial infarction, heart failure, cardiomyopathy, abnormal heart rhythms, and congenital heart disease before they were hospitalized for COVID-19. We collected data on patient’s signs and symptoms, clinical and paraclinical examinations, and any underlying comorbidities. t-test was used to determine the significant difference between the two deceased and alive groups. In addition, the relation between pairs of symptoms and pairs of comorbidities has been determined via correlation computation. Findings: Our findings suggest that signs and symptoms such as fever, cough, myalgia, chest pain, chills, abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and anorexia had no impact on patients' mortality. There was a significant correlation between COVID-19 cardiovascular patients’ mortality rate and symptoms such as headache, Loss of consciousness (LOC), oxygen saturation less than 93%, and need for mechanical ventilation. We observed no relationship in cardiac cases between mortality and comorbidities such as diabetes, cancer, pulmonary diseases, renal diseases, hematologic disorders, neurological diseases, and hypertension. The only risk factor that has impact on patients’ mortality was age. Other risk factors such as smoking status or addiction had no impact. Interpretation: Our results might help physicians identify early symptoms, comorbidities, and risk factors related to mortality in cardiovascular disease patients hospitalized for COVID-19. Funding Information: There is no funding. Declaration of Interests: The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest. Ethics Approval Statement: The study was approved by the Semnan Hospital Ethics Committee. All the patients completed written consent form before their enrolment in the data collection procedure.

One of the main causes of death in the world is coronary artery disease (CAD). CAD occurs when there is stenosis in one or more of the three major coronary arteries: right coronary artery (RCA), left circumflex (LCX) artery, and left anterior descending (LAD) artery. The gold standard or CAD diagnosis is angiography, but it is invasive, costly, and time consuming. Therefore, researchers continually seek new machine learning methods that can screen for CAD non-invasively. For reliable and cost-effective CAD diagnosis, several algorithms have been developed. Most prior studies analyzed the presence or absence of CAD in a dichotomous manner. Herein, we studied the more complex problem of classification of stenosis in individual LAD, LCX, and RCA by applying machine learning algorithms on the Z-Alizadeh Sani dataset that comprised 303 subjects, each with 54 features. In addition, our new methodology is developed to handle model uncertainty in the prediction of individual artery stenosis. It uses the hyperplane distance from a sample and accuracy rate of the classifier during the training phase to enhance its performance. Our results demonstrate high diagnostic performance of the proposed method for diagnosis of stenosis in individual RCA, LCX, and LAD, achieving accuracy rates of 82.67%, 83.67% and 86.43%, respectively. This is the best performance of ML techniques applied to the Z-Alizadeh Sani dataset.

SummaryBackgroundTo prevent infectious diseases, it is necessary to understand how they are spread and their clinical features. Early identification of risk factors and clinical features is needed to identify critically ill patients, provide suitable treatments, and prevent mortality.MethodsWe conducted a prospective study on COVID-19 patients referred to a tertiary hospital in Iran between March and November 2020. Of the 3008 patients (mean age 59.3±18.7 years, range 1 to 100 years), 1324 were women. We investigated COVID-19 related mortality and its association with clinical features including headache, chest pain, symptoms on CT, hospitalization, time to infection, history of neurological disorders, having a single or multiple risk factors, fever, myalgia, dizziness, seizure, abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea and anorexia.FindingsThere was a significant association between COVID-19 mortality and old age, headache, chest pain, respiratory distress, low respiratory rate, oxygen saturation less than 93%, need for a mechanical ventilator, having symptoms on CT, hospitalization, time to infection, history of hypertension, neurological disorders, cardiovascular diseases and having a risk factor or multiple risk factors. In contrast, there was no significant association between mortality and gender, fever, myalgia, dizziness, seizure, abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea and anorexia.InterpretationOur results might help identify early symptoms related to COVID-19 and better manage patients clinically.

Understanding the data and reaching accurate conclusions are of paramount importance in the present era of big data. Machine learning and probability theory methods have been widely used for this purpose in various fields. One critically important yet less explored aspect is capturing and analyzing uncertainties in the data and model. Proper quantification of uncertainty helps to provide valuable information to obtain accurate diagnosis. This paper reviewed related studies conducted in the last 30 years (from 1991 to 2020) in handling uncertainties in medical data using probability theory and machine learning techniques. Medical data is more prone to uncertainty due to the presence of noise in the data. So, it is very important to have clean medical data without any noise to get accurate diagnosis. The sources of noise in the medical data need to be known to address this issue. Based on the medical data obtained by the physician, diagnosis of disease, and treatment plan are prescribed. Hence, the uncertainty is growing in healthcare and there is limited knowledge to address these problems. Our findings indicate that there are few challenges to be addressed in handling the uncertainty in medical raw data and new models. In this work, we have summarized various methods employed to overcome this problem. Nowadays, various novel deep learning techniques have been proposed to deal with such uncertainties and improve the performance in decision making.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) is currently the most common contagious disease which is prevalent all over the world. The main challenge of this disease is the primary diagnosis to prevent secondary infections and its spread from one person to another. Therefore, it is essential to use an automatic diagnosis system along with clinical procedures for the rapid diagnosis of COVID-19 to prevent its spread. Artificial intelligence techniques using computed tomography (CT) images of the lungs and chest radiography have the potential to obtain high diagnostic performance for Covid-19 diagnosis. In this study, a fusion of convolutional neural network (CNN), support vector machine (SVM), and Sobel filter is proposed to detect COVID-19 using X-ray images. A new X-ray image dataset was collected and subjected to high pass filter using a Sobel filter to obtain the edges of the images. Then these images are fed to CNN deep learning model followed by SVM classifier with ten-fold cross validation strategy. This method is designed so that it can learn with not many data. Our results show that the proposed CNN-SVM with Sobel filter (CNN-SVM + Sobel) achieved the highest classification accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of 99.02%, 100% and 95.23%, respectively in automated detection of COVID-19. It showed that using Sobel filter can improve the performance of CNN. Unlike most of the other researches, this method does not use a pre-trained network. We have also validated our developed model using six public databases and obtained the highest performance. Hence, our developed model is ready for clinical application.

While coronary angiography is the gold standard diagnostic tool for coronary artery disease (CAD), but it is associated with procedural risk, it is an invasive technique requiring arterial puncture, and it subjects the patient to radiation and iodinated contrast exposure. Artificial intelligence (AI) can provide a pretest probability of disease that can be used to triage patients for angiography. This review comprehensively investigates published papers in the domain of CAD detection using different AI techniques from 1991 to 2020, in order to discern broad trends and geographical differences. Moreover, key decision factors affecting CAD diagnosis are identified for different parts of the world by aggregating the results from different studies. In this study, all datasets that have been used for the studies for CAD detection, their properties, and achieved performances using various AI techniques, are presented, compared, and analyzed. In particular, the effectiveness of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques to diagnose and predict CAD are reviewed. From PubMed, Scopus, Ovid MEDLINE, and Google Scholar search, 500 papers were selected to be investigated. Among these selected papers, 256 papers met our criteria and hence were included in this study. Our findings demonstrate that AI-based techniques have been increasingly applied for the detection of CAD since 2008. AI-based techniques that utilized electrocardiography (ECG), demographic characteristics, symptoms, physical examination findings, and heart rate signals, reported high accuracy for the detection of CAD. In these papers, the authors ranked the features based on their assessed clinical importance with ML techniques. The results demonstrate that the attribution of the relative importance of ML features for CAD diagnosis is different among countries. More recently, DL methods have yielded high CAD detection performance using ECG signals, which drives its burgeoning adoption.

Preventing communicable diseases requires understanding the spread, epidemiology, clinical features, progression, and prognosis of the disease. Early identification of risk factors and clinical outcomes might help to identify critically ill patients, provide proper treatment and prevent mortality. We conducted a prospective study in patients with flu-like symptoms referred to the imaging department of a tertiary hospital in IRAN between 3 March 2020 and 8 April 2020. Patients with COVID-19 were followed up to check their health condition after two months. The categorical data between groups were analyzed by Fisher's exact test and continuous data by Wilcoxon Rank-Sum Test. 319 patients (mean age 45.48±18.50 years, 177 women) were enrolled. Fever, dyspnea, weakness, shivering, C-reactive protein (CRP), fatigue, dry cough, anorexia, anosmia, ageusia, dizziness, sweating and age were the most important symptoms of COVID-19 infection. Traveling in past three months, asthma, taking corticosteroids, liver disease, rheumatological disease, cough with sputum, eczema, conjunctivitis, tobacco use, and chest pain did not have any relationship with COVID-19. To the best of our knowledge, some of the effective features on the mortality due to COVID-19 are investigated for the first time in this research. This study may prove helpful in early prediction and risk reduction of mortality in patients infected with COVID-19. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Background Preventing communicable diseases requires understanding the spread, epidemiology, clinical features, progression, and prognosis of the disease. Early identification of risk factors and clinical outcomes might help to identify critically ill patients, provide proper treatment and prevent mortality. Methods We conducted a prospective study in patients with flu-like symptoms referred to the imaging department of a tertiary hospital in IRAN between 3 March 2020 and 8 April 2020. Patients with COVID- 19 were followed up to check their health condition after two months. The categorical data between groups were analyzed by Fisher’s exact test and continuous data by Wilcoxon Rank-Sum Test. Findings 319 patients (mean age 45.48±18.50 years, 177 women) were enrolled. Fever, dyspnea, weakness, shivering, C-reactive protein (CRP), fatigue, dry cough, anorexia, anosmia, ageusia, dizziness, sweating and age were the most important symptoms of COVID-19 infection. Traveling in past three months, asthma, taking corticosteroids, liver disease, rheumatological disease, cough with sputum, eczema, conjunctivitis, tobacco use, and chest pain did not have any relationship with COVID-19. Research in context Evidence before this study We searched Google scholar, PUBMED and Scopus for articles that investigated the recent epidemic of COVID-19, especially those that investigate effective risk factors. We found that there is not enough research in this field, especially the risk factor that is effective in finding the rate of mortality of this disease. Added value of this study We determined some of the most important effective risk factors on prediction, clinical outcome and mortality rate of COVID-19 infection. To the best of our knowledge, some of these risk factors are investigated in this work for the first time. Our findings could provide good insight into the early prediction of the disease, its clinical outcomes, and suggest a cost-effective method for mortality prediction. Implication of all the available evidence COVID-19 can transmit human-to-human and lead to severe symptoms and high mortality. Early prediction of this disease and the risk of mortality can help the physicians to better manage this worldwide health problem. Interpretation Finding clinical symptoms for early diagnosis of COVID-19 is a critical part of prevention. These symptoms can help in the assessment of disease progression. To the best of our knowledge, some of the effective features on the mortality due to COVID-19 are investigated for the first time in this research. Funding None

Background and objective Cardiovascular diseases are an extremely widespread sickness and account for 17 million deaths in the world per annum. Coronary artery disease (CAD) is one of such diseases with an annual mortality rate of about 7 million. Thus, early diagnosis of CAD is of vital importance. Angiography is currently the modality of choice for the detection of CAD. However, its complications and costs have prompted researchers to seek alternative methods via machine learning algorithms. Methods The present study proposes a novel machine learning algorithm. The proposed algorithm uses three classifiers for detection of the stenosis of three coronary arteries, i.e., left anterior descending (LAD), left circumflex (LCX) and right coronary artery (RCA) to get higher accuracy for CAD diagnosis. Results This method was applied on the extension of Z-Alizadeh Sani dataset which contains demographic, examination, ECG, and laboratory and echo data of 500 patients. This method achieves an accuracy, sensitivity and specificity rates of 96.40%, 100% and 88.1%, respectively for the detection of CAD. To our knowledge, such high rates of accuracy and sensitivity have not been attained elsewhere before. Conclusion This new algorithm reliably distinguishes those with normal coronary arteries from those with CAD which may obviate the need for angiography in the normal group.

As benign tumors, warts are made through the mediation of Human Papillomavirus (HPV) and may grow on all parts of body, especially hands and feet. There are several treatment methods for this illness. However, none of them can heal all patients. Consequently, physicians are looking for more effective and customized treatments for each patient. They are endeavoring to discover which treatments have better impacts on a particular patient. The aim of this study is to identify the appropriate treatment for two common types of warts (plantar and common) and to predict the responses of two of the best methods (immunotherapy and cryotherapy) to the treatment. As an original work, the study was conducted on 180 patients, with plantar and common warts, who had referred to the dermatology clinic of Ghaem Hospital, Mashhad, Iran. In this study, 90 patients were treated by cryotherapy method with liquid nitrogen and 90 patients with immunotherapy method. The selection of the treatment method was made randomly. A fuzzy logic rule-based system was proposed and implemented to predict the responses to the treatment method. It was observed that the prediction accuracy of immunotherapy and cryotherapy methods was 83.33% and 80.7%, respectively. According to the results obtained, the benefits of this expert system are multifold: assisting physicians in selecting the best treatment method, saving time for patients, reducing the treatment cost, and improving the quality of treatment. We prepared two datasets to select treatment method for warts.We proposed an expert system for warts' treatment method selection.The prediction accuracy for immunotherapy and cryotherapy methods are 83.33% and 80.7%, respectively.A number of rules were introduced for selecting warts' treatment method.

We present the coronary artery disease (CAD) database, a comprehensive resource, comprising 126 papers and 68 datasets relevant to CAD diagnosis, extracted from the scientific literature from 1992 and 2018. These data were collected to help advance research on CAD-related machine learning and data mining algorithms, and hopefully to ultimately advance clinical diagnosis and early treatment. To aid users, we have also built a web application that presents the database through various reports., Measurement(s)coronary artery diseaseTechnology Type(s)digital curationFactor Type(s)year • diseaseSample Characteristic - OrganismHomo sapiens Machine-accessible metadata file describing the reported data: 10.6084/m9.figshare.9825680

Genetic Network Programming is an evolutionary algorithm which can be considered as an extension of Genetic Programming but with a graph-structure instead of tree-structure individuals. This algorithm is mainly used for single/multi-agent decision making. It uses a graph to model a strategy that an agent follows to achieve its goal. However, in this algorithm, crossover and mutation operators repeatedly destroy the structures of individuals and make new ones. Although this can lead to better structures, it may also break suitable structures in elite individuals and increase the time needed to achieve optimal solutions. In this research, we modified the evolution process of Genetic Network Programming so that breaking useful structures will be less likely. In the proposed algorithm, the experiences of the best individuals in successive generations are saved. Then, in some specific generations, these experiences are used to generate offspring. The experimental results of the proposed method were tested on two common agent control problem benchmarks namely Tile-world and Pursuit-domain. The results showed the superiority of our method with respect to standard Genetic Network Programming and some of its versions.

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the most common cardiovascular disease (CVD) and often leads to a heart attack. It annually causes millions of deaths and billions of dollars in financial losses worldwide. Angiography, which is invasive and risky, is the standard procedure for diagnosing CAD. Alternatively, machine learning (ML) techniques have been widely used in the literature as fast, affordable, and noninvasive approaches for CAD detection. The results that have been published on ML-based CAD diagnosis differ substantially in terms of the analyzed datasets, sample sizes, features, location of data collection, performance metrics, and applied ML techniques. Due to these fundamental differences, achievements in the literature cannot be generalized. This paper conducts a comprehensive and multifaceted review of all relevant studies that were published between 1992 and 2019 for ML-based CAD diagnosis. The impacts of various factors, such as dataset characteristics (geographical location, sample size, features, and the stenosis of each coronary artery) and applied ML techniques (feature selection, performance metrics, and method) are investigated in detail. Finally, the important challenges and shortcomings of ML-based CAD diagnosis are discussed.

Nowadays, a variety of cancers have become common among humans which unfortunately are the cause of death for many of these people. Early detection and diagnosis of cancers can have a significant impact on the survival of patients and treatment cost reduction. Colon cancer is the third and the second main cause of women's and men's death worldwide among cancers. Hence, many researchers have been trying to provide new methods for early diagnosis of colon cancer. In this study, we apply statistical hypothesis tests such as t-test and Mann–Whitney–Wilcoxon and machine learning methods such as Neural Network, KNN and Decision Tree to detect the most effective genes in the vital status of colon cancer patients. We normalize the dataset using a new two-step method. In the first step, the genes within each sample (patient) are normalized to have zero mean and unit variance. In the second step, normalization is done for each gene across the whole dataset. Analyzing the results shows that this normalization method is more efficient than the others and improves the overall performance of the research. Afterwards, we apply unsupervised learning methods to find the meaningful structures in colon cancer gene expressions. In this regard, the dimensionality of the dataset is reduced by employing Principle Component Analysis (PCA). Next, we cluster the patients according to the PCA extracted features. We then check the labeling results of unsupervised learning methods using different supervised learning algorithms. Finally, we determine genes which have major impact on colon cancer mortality rate in each cluster. Our conducted study is the first which suggests that the colon cancer patients can be categorized into two clusters. In each cluster, 20 effective genes were extracted which can be important for early diagnosis of colon cancer. Many of these genes have been identified for the first time.

Nowadays, cardiovascular diseases are very common and are one of the main causes of death worldwide. One major type of such diseases is the coronary artery disease (CAD). The best and most accurate method for the diagnosis of CAD is angiography, which has significant complications and costs. Researchers are, therefore, seeking novel modalities for CAD diagnosis via data mining methods. To that end, several algorithms and datasets have been developed. However, a few studies have considered the stenosis of each major coronary artery separately. We attempted to achieve a high rate of accuracy in the diagnosis of the stenosis of each major coronary artery. Analytical methods were used to investigate the importance of features on artery stenosis. Further, a proposed classification model was built to predict each artery status in new visitors. To further enhance the models, a proposed feature selection method was employed to select more discriminative feature subsets for each artery. According to the experiments, accuracy rates of 86.14%, 83.17%, and 83.50% were achieved for the diagnosis of the stenosis of the left anterior descending (LAD) artery, left circumflex (LCX) artery and right coronary artery (RCA), respectively. To the best of our knowledge, these are the highest accuracy rates that have been obtained in the literature so far. In addition, a number of rules with high confidence were introduced for deciding whether the arteries were stenotic or not. Also, we applied the proposed method on two challenging datasets and obtained the best accuracy in comparison with other methods.

Evolutionary Algorithms are of the most successful algorithms in solving various optimization problems. Genetic network programming is one of the Evolutionary Algorithms with good capabilities in agent control problems. In this algorithm, the individuals’ structure is a directed graph. Using this structure, it is possible to model the solution of many complex problems. However, in this algorithm, crossover and mutation operators repeatedly break the structures of individuals and make new ones. Although this can lead to better structures, it may break suitable structures in elite individuals. Meanwhile, in stochastic environments, each time an individual is evaluated, it leads to different fitness values. So, calculating the fitness value of individuals requires evaluating each individual several times. This extremely decreases the evolution process speed. In this paper, inspired by mechanisms of ant colony algorithm, a new method is proposed to prevent the algorithm from iteratively breaking down the structures of individuals. This method improves the performance of individuals from one generation to the next using a constructive process. Unlike generative process that the individuals are generated by combination of some others, in constructive process they are produced according to the experience of previous generations. Using this mechanism, we not only prevent breaking suitable structures but also can manage uncertainty in stochastic environments. Our proposed method is used to solve two agent control problems when the environment is deterministic or stochastic. The results show that the proposed algorithm has very high ability in creating an efficient decision making strategies especially in stochastic environments.

In RoboCup competitions, Nao is used in 3D soccer simulation league. To be the best in this league, the most important behaviors required are walking, kicking and getting up. Having a tool to design these behaviors appropriately, is essential. Motion editors may be used to design these behaviors. In this paper, AIUT3D motion editor is presented capable of designing arbitrary motions for different types of Nao robots. To the best of our knowledge this is the first motion editor that is connected to the ODE physics engine used by SimSpark in real-time. The motion editor can accelerate development of different skills such as long range kick and goalie dive. Using motion editor, our team AIUT3D could achieve 3rd place in IranOpen2017, 5th place in total ranking and 3rd place in technical challenges of RoboCup 2017. AIUT3D gained all of these achievements in its first appearance in these competitions.

swarm optimization is a population-based algorithm and used for optimization in a wide range of problems. In this article, a method that is called Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization or HPSO is proposed. It is composed of some versions of particle swarm optimization algorithms, which have subgroups in their structures. They are DMS-PSO, PS2OS and MCPSO. In fact, a hierarchical structure is used to compose a new version of optimization algorithm and combine the results of other structures of PSO. Proposed structure has been tested on four unimodal and four multimodal test functions. Although the memory usage has no difference with other compared versions, it is much faster in many cases. Also the rank of fitness values, are good and suitable in all test functions. In addition, it is possible to execute it concurrently.

A hybrid method was proposed in this research that combines genetic algorithm and neural network.The proposed method could increase the performance of neural network.The proposed method could reach very good accuracy rate in coronary artery disease diagnosis. Cardiovascular disease is one of the most rampant causes of death around the world and was deemed as a major illness in Middle and Old ages. Coronary artery disease, in particular, is a widespread cardiovascular malady entailing high mortality rates. Angiography is, more often than not, regarded as the best method for the diagnosis of coronary artery disease; on the other hand, it is associated with high costs and major side effects. Much research has, therefore, been conducted using machine learning and data mining so as to seek alternative modalities. Accordingly, we herein propose a highly accurate hybrid method for the diagnosis of coronary artery disease. As a matter of fact, the proposed method is able to increase the performance of neural network by approximately 10% through enhancing its initial weights using genetic algorithm which suggests better weights for neural network. Making use of such methodology, we achieved accuracy, sensitivity and specificity rates of 93.85%, 97% and 92% respectively, on Z-Alizadeh Sani dataset.