Background and objective: Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is one of the deadly diseases that can affect a lot of vital organs in the human body such as heart, liver, and lungs. Many individuals might be at early stage of kidney disease and not have any signs, which might lead to a sudden death. Previous research showed that early prediction of CKD is very important in the medical field for physicians’ decision-making and patients’ health and life. To this end, constructing an efficient prediction system for CKD, which is the goal of this paper, often reduces medical errors and overall healthcare cost. Methods: Classification and association rule mining techniques were integrated and utilised to construct an efficient system for predicting and diagnosing CKD and its causes using weka and SPSS as platform environments. In particular, five classification algorithms, namely, naive Bayes, decision tree, support vector machine, K-nearest neighbour, and JRip were used to achieve the research goal. In addition, Apriori algorithm was used to discover strong relationship rules between attributes. The experiments were conducted on real medical dataset collected from hospitals and patient monitoring systems. Results: The experiments achieved high accuracy of 98.50% for K-nearest neighbour (KNN) classifier and achieved 96.00% when using classier based on association rule (JRip). Conclusions: We conclude by showing that applying integrative approach by combining classification algorithms and association rule mining can significantly improve the classification accuracy and be more useful for CKD prediction. This research has also several theoretical and practical implications for the medical field and healthcare industry.
White Blood Cell (WBC) segmentation is one of the important topics in the medical image processing field. Many researchers proposed several clustering approaches to segment WBC from blood smear microscopic images. However, a fast and robust segmentation of WBCs is still a challenging task. In this work, we propose parallel algorithms that utilize the parallelism capabilities of the Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to accelerate the segmentation of WBC from microscopic images. In this research, we implement the main image segmentation clustering algorithms using one thread that we run on a single CPU (sequential implementation) and using multiple threads that we run on both the CPU and the GPU (hybrid CPU-GPU). We focus our work on the most common four segmentation algorithms: Standard K-means (SKM), Adaptive K-means (AKM), Fuzzy C-means (FCM), and Fuzzy Possibilistic C-means (FPCM). We implement these algorithms and the pre-processing steps for WBC image segmentation in CUDA programming to take the advantages of the large number of cores in GPUs. In this work, our hybrid implementation accelerated the four studied sequential algorithms by 4X, 3.8X, 3.4X, and 3.4X, respectively, without affecting WBC segmentation quality.
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