arXiv subjects

Gabriela Fernandes

Publications and source records attributed to Gabriela Fernandes.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Explainable Machine Learning for Pediatric Dental Risk Stratification Using Socio-Demographic Determinants

Background: Pediatric dental disease remains one of the most prevalent and inequitable chronic health conditions worldwide. Although strong epidemiological evidence links oral health outcomes to socio-economic and demographic determinants, most artificial intelligence (AI) applications in dentistry rely on image-based diagnosis and black-box prediction models, limiting transparency and ethical applicability in pediatric populations. Objective: This study aimed to develop and evaluate an explainable machine learning framework for pediatric dental risk stratification that prioritizes interpretability, calibration, and ethical deployment over maximal predictive accuracy. Methods: A supervised machine learning model was trained using population-level pediatric data including age, income-to-poverty ratio, race/ethnicity, gender, and medical history. Model performance was assessed using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis and calibration curves. Explainability was achieved using SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) to provide global and individual-level interpretation of predictions. Results: The model achieved modest discrimination (AUC = 0.61) with conservative calibration, underestimating risk at higher probability levels. SHAP analysis identified age and income-to-poverty ratio as the strongest contributors to predicted risk, followed by race/ethnicity and gender. Conclusion: Explainable machine learning enables transparent, prevention-oriented pediatric dental risk stratification and supports population screening and equitable resource allocation rather than diagnostic decision-making.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

A Lightweight, Interpretable Deep Learning System for Automated Detection of Cervical Adenocarcinoma In Situ (AIS)

Cervical adenocarcinoma in situ (AIS) is a critical premalignant lesion whose accurate histopathological diagnosis is challenging. Early detection is essential to prevent progression to invasive cervical adenocarcinoma. In this study, we developed a deep learning-based virtual pathology assistant capable of distinguishing AIS from normal cervical gland histology using the CAISHI dataset, which contains 2240 expert-labeled H&E images (1010 normal and 1230 AIS). All images underwent Macenko stain normalization and patch-based preprocessing to enhance morphological feature representation. An EfficientNet-B3 convolutional neural network was trained using class-balanced sampling and focal loss to address dataset imbalance and emphasize difficult examples. The final model achieved an overall accuracy of 0.7323, with an F1-score of 0.75 for the Abnormal class and 0.71 for the Normal class. Grad-CAM heatmaps demonstrated biologically interpretable activation patterns, highlighting nuclear atypia and glandular crowding consistent with AIS morphology. The trained model was deployed in a Gradio-based virtual diagnostic assistant. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of lightweight, interpretable AI systems for cervical gland pathology, with potential applications in screening workflows, education, and low-resource settings.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Morpho-Genomic Deep Learning for Ovarian Cancer Subtype and Gene Mutation Prediction from Histopathology

Ovarian cancer remains one of the most lethal gynecological malignancies, largely due to late diagnosis and extensive heterogeneity across subtypes. Current diagnostic methods are limited in their ability to reveal underlying genomic variations essential for precision oncology. This study introduces a novel hybrid deep learning pipeline that integrates quantitative nuclear morphometry with deep convolutional image features to perform ovarian cancer subtype classification and gene mutation inference directly from Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) histopathological images. Using $\sim45,000$ image patches sourced from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and public datasets, a fusion model combining a ResNet-50 Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) encoder and a Vision Transformer (ViT) was developed. This model successfully captured both local morphological texture and global tissue context. The pipeline achieved a robust overall subtype classification accuracy of $84.2\%$ (Macro AUC of $0.87 \pm 0.03$). Crucially, the model demonstrated the capacity for gene mutation inference with moderate-to-high accuracy: $AUC_{TP53} = 0.82 \pm 0.02$, $AUC_{BRCA1} = 0.76 \pm 0.04$, and $AUC_{ARID1A} = 0.73 \pm 0.05$. Feature importance analysis established direct quantitative links, revealing that nuclear solidity and eccentricity were the dominant predictors for TP53 mutation. These findings validate that quantifiable histological phenotypes encode measurable genomic signals, paving the way for cost-effective, precision histopathology in ovarian cancer triage and diagnosis.

eess.IV↗