Application of Artificial Intelligence and Modeling Frameworks in Health Informatics and Related Fields

A special issue of Computers (ISSN 2073-431X).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2025 | Viewed by 772

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Shannon School of Business, Cape Breton University, Sydney, NS B1M 1A2, Canada
Interests: covariate-dependent Markov; marginal; conditional; joint models; big data modeling framework; longitudinal data modeling; machine learning; AI

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

There is emerging evidence of the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare delivery systems, particularly in the health informatics (HI) field which uses information technology, and data analytics to improve healthcare by providing personalized treatment plans, improving patient outcomes, and designing public health strategies, among others.

Recently, the health informatics field has been enriched by adopting machine learning, deep learning, and statistical learning models to improve healthcare delivery systems. In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has shown tremendous potential and applications in health informatics. This new technology can transform the HI field, providing new tools and approaches for managing and analyzing HI data to improve patient care, research, and administration. Some areas of interest for papers include precision medicine and genomics data analysis, survival analysis, cluster data modeling, telehealth implementation during pandemics, explainable AI in clinical decision support systems, cybersecurity in healthcare systems, big data analytics for population health management, wearable technology for chronic disease management, ethical considerations of patient data sharing, etc.

Dr. Rafiqul Chowdhury
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • artificial intelligence
  • machine learning
  • deep learning
  • disease diagnosis
  • predictive analytics
  • health informatics
  • telemedicine
  • natural language processing
  • personalized medicine
  • big data and modeling frameworks
  • telehealth solutions
  • longitudinal/repeated-measures data
  • data analysis of genomic and clinical trials

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

24 pages, 58563 KiB  
Article
Interpretable Deep Learning for Diabetic Retinopathy: A Comparative Study of CNN, ViT, and Hybrid Architectures
by Weijie Zhang, Veronika Belcheva and Tatiana Ermakova
Computers 2025, 14(5), 187; https://doi.org/10.3390/computers14050187 - 12 May 2025
Viewed by 295
Abstract
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of vision impairment worldwide, requiring early detection for effective treatment. Deep learning models have been widely used for automated DR classification, with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) being the most established approach. Recently, Vision Transformers (ViTs) have [...] Read more.
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of vision impairment worldwide, requiring early detection for effective treatment. Deep learning models have been widely used for automated DR classification, with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) being the most established approach. Recently, Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown promise, but a direct comparison of their performance and interpretability remains limited. Additionally, hybrid models that combine CNN and transformer-based architectures have not been extensively studied. This work systematically evaluates CNNs (ResNet-50), ViTs (Vision Transformer and SwinV2-Tiny), and hybrid models (Convolutional Vision Transformer, LeViT-256, and CvT-13) on DR classification using publicly available retinal image datasets. The models are assessed based on classification accuracy and interpretability, applying Grad-CAM and Attention-Rollout to analyze decision-making patterns. Results indicate that hybrid models outperform both standalone CNNs and ViTs, achieving a better balance between local feature extraction and global context awareness. The best-performing model (CvT-13) achieved a Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) score of 0.84 and an AUC of 0.93 on the test set. Interpretability analysis shows that CNNs focus on fine-grained lesion details, while ViTs exhibit broader but less localized attention. These findings provide valuable insights for optimizing deep learning models in medical imaging, supporting the development of clinically viable AI-driven DR screening systems. Full article
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