Ahmad M. Shahin

Lebanese University · Doctorate School of Science and Technology

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in using image processing, computer vision, and machine learning in biological and medical imaging research. One area of this interest is the diagnosis of brain tumors, which is considered a difficult and time‐consuming task traditionally performed manually. In this study, we present a method fo...

Shigella is one of the commonest causes of diarrhoea worldwide and a major public health problem. Shigella serotyping is based on a standardized scheme that splits Shigella strains into four serogroups and 60 serotypes on the basis of biochemical tests and O-antigen structures. This conventional serotyping method is laborious, time-consuming, impos...

Genome sequencing facilitates the study of bacterial taxonomy and allows the re-evaluation of the taxonomic relationships between species. Here, we aimed to analyze the draft genomes of four commensal Neisseria clinical isolates from the semen of infertile Lebanese men. To determine the phylogenetic relationships among these strains and other Neiss...

Purpose: To evaluate the usefulness of computed tomography (CT) texture descriptors integrated with machine-learning (ML) models in the identification of clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) and for the first time papillary renal cell carcinoma (pRCC) tumor nuclear grades [World Health Organization (WHO)/International Society of Urologic Patholo...

Third generation cephalosporins (3GC)-resistant Neisseria flavescens could cause difficult-to-treat-infections. This study aimed to determine the genetic determinants of 3GC resistance using whole genome sequence comparisons of three N. flavescens; one of which was 3GC-resistant, while two were susceptible. Mutations in penA, ponA, and porB might b...

The widespread of 3D shapes nowadays, gained it huge importance in several fields like computer vision, engineering, image processing, and many others. Its main challenge is the representation of these shapes and projecting them into canonical features referred to as descriptors. The necessity of them appears in different tasks like classification,...

Given the boom linked to smart mobility, transport systems require increasingly precise and relevant navigation applications to offer optimized journeys in terms of time and energy consumption, such as for HEV. Most of these navigation applications are based on the processing of 2D digital road maps, while taking into account the GNSS location of v...

In this paper we present a hybrid model for image compression based on segmentation and total variation regularization. The main motivation behind our approach is to offer decode image with immediate access to objects/features of interest. We are targeting high quality decoded image in order to be useful on smart devices, for analysis purpose, as w...

The problem of segmenting linearly ordered data is frequently encountered in time-series analysis, computational biology, and natural language processing. Segmentations obtained independently from replicate data sets or from the same data with different methods or parameter settings pose the problem of computing an aggregate or consensus segmentati...

Assessment of renal function and structure accurately remains essential in the diagnosis and prognosis of Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD). Advanced imaging, including Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Ultrasound Elastography (UE), Computed Tomography (CT) and scintigraphy (PET, SPECT) offers the opportunity to non-invasively retrieve structural, funct...

3D models that are widely used nowadays, mostly represented by meshes or point clouds, these models are appearing in many fields like computer vision, informatics, engineering, as well as medicine. This paper considers the problem of shape matching and retrieval between 3D models where finding superior one-to-one correspondence between them are the...

The goal of this study was to develop an ultrasound (US) scatterer spacing estimation method using an enhanced cepstral analysis based on continuous wavelet transforms (CWTs). Simulations of backscattering media containing periodic and quasi-periodic scatterers were carried out to test the developed algorithm. Experimental data from HT-29 pellets a...

Bacteriocins from lactic acid bacteria (LAB) are successfully applied as natural alternatives to food preservation and to antibiotics; however, information on these antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) is scattered through the literature and databases. Therefore, we developed the LABiocin database, a specialized database on LAB bacteriocins. The database...

The health industry collects huge amounts of health data, which, unfortunately, are not mined to discover hidden information. Information technologies can provide alternative approaches to the diagnosis of the osteoporosis disease. In this chapter, the authors examine the potential use of classification techniques on a huge volume of healthcare dat...

The health industry collects huge amounts of health data, which, unfortunately, are not mined to discover hidden information. Information technologies can provide alternative approaches to the diagnosis of the osteoporosis disease. In this chapter, the authors examine the potential use of classification techniques on a huge volume of healthcare dat...

The growing demands on service quality and cost containment challenge the healthcare organizations around the world. They are particularly crucial with respect to common illness or medical conditions. One strategy that can be used to address these issues is the utilization of healthcare information systems (HIS) for decision support and knowledge m...

In this paper, a new gender classification method based on x-ray images of hand is developed. The main idea aims at examining the effects of Phalanges features on gender classification. This method is based on the average width and the length of the fingers skeleton. Encouraging results have been obtained. Index Terms— Forensic Anthropology, Gender...

In this paper, we are interested in studying the robustness against noise of the biometric system based on Hand X-Ray images. Specifically, PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) has been used to measure the distortion rate related to the acquisition conditions such as JPG compression, change in resolution and dose reduction. The identification rate has...

Web services technology is the latest evolution in distributed computing. With all of the advantages of web services, one of the main hurdles remains security in composite web services. In this paper, we tackle this problem through a new approach towards the integration of security into the BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) process of comp...

This paper presents a new method to segment bone tissue in an x-ray images. The proposed method is completely automatic. First of all, it enhances the contrast of the grayscale image using contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization. Afterwards, the image intensity values are further modified by removing the background and soft tissue. Then a...

Abstract— In this work we propose a fully automatic algorithm for human identification using hand X-ray images. More specifically, this approach is appropriate to prevent forgeries in high security level systems. The proposed algorithm consists of three steps, namely: (1) segmentation of phalanges, (2) feature extraction using complex Fourier descr...

Image coding based on clustering provides immediate access to targeted features of interest in a high-quality decoded image. This approach is useful for intelligent devices, as well as for multimedia content-based description standards. The result of image clustering cannot be precise in some positions especially on pixels with edge information whi...

In this paper we propose an image coding approach based on Alternative Fuzzy c-Means. Our main objective is to provide an immediate access to targeted features of interest in a high quality decoded image. This technique is useful for intelligent devices, as well as for multimedia content-based description standards. The use of AFcM reduces the codi...

In this paper we present a hybrid model for image compression based on fuzzy segmentation and Partial Differential Equations. The main motivation behind our approach is to produce immediate access to objects/features of interest in a high quality decoded image which could be useful on smart devices, for analysis purpose, as well as for multimedia c...

The healthcare environment is generally perceived as being information rich yet knowledge poor. The healthcare industry collects huge amounts of healthcare data which, unfortunately, are not "mined" to discover hidden information. However, there is a lack of effective analysis tools to discover hidden relationships and trends in data. The informati...

Nowadays, and with the current progress in technologies and business sales, databases with large amount of data exist especially in Retail Companies. The main objective of this study is to reduce the complexity of the classification problems while maintaining the prediction classification quality. We propose to apply the promising technique Rough s...

Skin region detection plays an important role in a variety of applications such as face detection, adult image filtering and gesture recognition. We present some definitions about digital imaging or numerical imaging and also the several image preprocessing and normalization. In this paper, we will tackle with two sub-problems which is the skin det...

Nowadays, and with the current progress in technologies and business sales, databases with large amount of data exist especially in retail companies. The main objective of this study is to reduce the complexity of the classifi cation problems while maintaining the

The healthcare environment is generally perceived as being information rich yet knowledge poor. The healthcare industry collects huge amounts of healthcare data which, unfortunately, are not ―mined‖ to discover hidden information. However, there is a lack of effective analysis tools to discover hidden relationships and trends in data. The informati...

Skin region detection plays an important role in a variety of applications such as face detection, adult image filtering and gesture recognition. We present some definitions about digital imaging or numerical imaging and also the several image preprocessing and normalization. In this paper, we will tackle with two sub-problems which is the skin det...

A key step in the development of an adaptive immune response to vaccines is the binding of peptides to molecules of the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) for presentation to T lymphocytes, which are thereby activated. Several algorithms have been proposed for such binding predictions, but are limited to a small number of MHC molecules and pres...

In this paper we present a comprehensive Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) procedure for the classification tasks. This MaxEnt is applied successfully to the problem of estimating the probability distribution function (pdf) of a class with a specific pattern, which is viewed as a probabilistic model handling the classification task. We propose an efficient...

The study described in this paper concerns natural object modeling in the context of uncertain, imprecise and inconsistent representation. We propose a fuzzy system which offers a global modeling of object properties such as color, shape, velocity, etc. This modeling makes a transition from a low level reasoning (pixel level), which implies a local...

This paper deals with recognition of complex shape and the method used is based on minimization of prior knowledge. We study both representations of image features and object shapes linked to photometry and geometry properties. A fuzzy representation is used which is defined by independent membership functions of geometric distortion, such as rotat...

The purpose of this paper is to define the mass functions for a set of multiple mixed hypothesis in an context of Dempster/Shafer (DS) theory which offers an interesting tool to combine data providing from heterogeneous sources more or less reliable by managing imprecision and uncertainty. This is particularly important when dealing with multi-moda...