As a neurodegenerative disorder, Parkinson’s disease (PD) affects the nerve cells of the human brain. Early detection and treatment can help to relieve the symptoms of PD. Recent PD studies have extracted the features from vocal disorders as a harbinger for PD detection, as patients face vocal changes and impairments at the early stages of PD. In this study, two hybrid models based on a Support Vector Machine (SVM) integrating with a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and a Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) are proposed to detect PD patients based on their vocal features. The first model extracted and reduced the principal components of vocal features based on the explained variance of each feature using PCA. For the first time, the second model used a novel Deep Neural Network (DNN) of an SAE, consisting of multiple hidden layers with L1 regularization to compress the vocal features into lower-dimensional latent space. In both models, reduced features were fed into the SVM as inputs, which performed classification by learning hyperplanes, along with projecting the data into a higher dimension. An F1-score, a Mathews Correlation Coefficient (MCC), and a Precision-Recall curve were used, along with accuracy to evaluate the proposed models due to highly imbalanced data. With its highest accuracy of 0.935, F1-score of 0.951, and MCC value of 0.788, the probing results show that the proposed model of the SAE-SVM surpassed not only the former model of the PCA-SVM and other standard models including Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), and Random Forest (RF), but also surpassed two recent studies using the same dataset. Oversampling and balancing the dataset with SMOTE boosted the performance of the models.

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Hepatitis C is a liver disease caused by the hepatitis C virus (HCV). In 2015, WHO reports that 71 million people were living with HCV, and 1.34 million died. In 2017, 13.1 million infected people knew their diagnosis and around 5 million patients were treated. HCV can cause acute and chronic hepatitis, where 20% of chronic hepatitis progresses to final-stage chronic liver cancer. Currently, no vaccine of HCV exists, and no effective treatments are available for demolishing the progression of hepatitis C. So spotting the stages of the disease is essential for diagnostic and therapeutic management of infected patients. This paper attempts to detect stages of hepatitis C virus so that further diagnosis and medication of hepatitis patients can be prescribed. It uses a supervised artificial neural network to make a prediction. Evaluation of results is done by cross-validation using the holdout method. Hepatitis C Egyptian-patients' dataset from UCI Machine Learning Repository is used for feeding the algorithms. The research succeeds to detect the hepatitis C stages and achieves an accuracy of 97%.

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