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Cardiovascular Diseases (CVDs), or heart diseases, are one of the top-ranking causes of death worldwide. About 1 in every 4 deaths is related to heart diseases, which are broadly classified as various types of abnormal heart conditions. However, diagnosis of CVDs is a time-consuming process in which data obtained from various clinical tests are manually analyzed. Therefore, new approaches for automating the detection of such irregularities in human heart conditions should be developed to provide medical practitioners with faster analysis by reducing the time of obtaining a diagnosis and enhancing results. Electronic Health Records(EHRs) are often utilized to discover useful data patterns that help improve the prediction of machine learning algorithms. Specifically, Machine Learning contributes significantly to solving issues like predictions in various domains, such as healthcare. Considering the abundance of available clinical data, there is a need to leverage such information for the betterment of humankind. Researchers have built various predictive models and systems over the years to help cardiologists and medical practitioners analyze data to attain meaningful insights. In this work, a predictive model is proposed for heart disease prediction based on the stacking of various classifiers in two levels(Base level and Meta level). Various heterogeneous learners are combined to produce strong model outcomes. The model obtained 92% accuracy in prediction with precision score of 92.6%, sensitivity of 92.6%, and specificity of 91%. The performance of the model was evaluated using various metrics, including accuracy, precision, recall, F1-scores, and area under the ROC curve values.

Air collection around the lung regions can cause lungs to collapse. Conditions like emphysema can cause chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), wherein lungs get progressively damaged, and the damage cannot be reversed by treatment. It is recommended that these conditions be detected early via highly complex image processing models applied to chest X-rays so that the patient’s life may be extended. Due to COPD, the bronchioles are narrowed and blocked with mucous, and causes destruction of alveolar geometry. These changes can be visually monitored via feature analysis using effective image classification models such as convolutional neural networks (CNN). CNNs have proven to possess more than 95% accuracy for detection of COPD conditions for static datasets. For consistent performance of CNNs, this paper presents an incremental learning mechanism that uses deep transfer learning for incrementally updating classification weights in the system. The proposed model is tested on 3 different lung X-ray datasets, and an accuracy of 99.95% is achieved for detection of COPD. In this paper, a model for temporal analysis of COPD detected imagery is proposed. This model uses Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) for evaluating lifespan of patients with COPD. Analysis of lifespan can assist doctors and other medical practitioners to take recommended steps for aggressive treatment. A smaller dataset was available to perform temporal analysis of COPD values because patients are not advised continuous chest X-rays due to their long-term side effects, which resulted in an accuracy of 97% for lifespan analysis.

Multi-focus image fusion (MIF) uses fusion rules to combine two or more images of the same scene with various focus values into a fully focused image. An all-in-focus image refers to a fully focused image that is more informative and useful for visual perception. A fused image with high quality is essential for maintaining shift-invariant and directional selectivity characteristics of the image. Traditional wavelet-based fusion methods, in turn, create ringing distortions in the fused image due to a lack of directional selectivity and shift-invariance. In this paper, a classical MIF system based on quarter shift dual-tree complex wavelet transform (qshiftN DTCWT) and modified principal component analysis (MPCA) in the laplacian pyramid (LP) domain is proposed to extract the focused image from multiple source images. In the proposed fusion approach, the LP first decomposes the multi-focus source images into low-frequency (LF) components and high-frequency (HF) components. Then, qshiftN DTCWT is used to fuse low and high-frequency components to produce a fused image. Finally, to improve the effectiveness of the qshiftN DTCWT and LP-based method, the MPCA algorithm is utilized to generate an all-in-focus image. Due to its directionality, and its shift-invariance, this transform can provide high-quality information in a fused image. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms many state-of-the-art techniques in terms of visual and quantitative evaluations.