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Winning football matches is the major goal of all football clubs in the world. Football being the most popular game in the world, many studies have been conducted to analyze and predict match winners based on players’ physical and technical performance. In this study, we analyzed the matches from the professional football league of Qatar Stars League (QSL) covering the matches held in the last ten seasons. We incorporated the highest number of professional matches from the last ten seasons covering from 2011 up to 2022 and proposed SoccerNet, a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU)-based deep learning-based model to predict match winners with over 80% accuracy. We considered match- and player-related information captured by STATS platform in a time slot of 15 minutes. Then we analyzed players’ performance at different positions on the field at different stages of the match. Our results indicated that in QSL, the defenders’ role in matches is more dominant than midfielders and forwarders. Moreover, our analysis suggests that the last 15–30 minutes of match segments of the matches from QSL have a more significant impact on the match result than other match segments. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed model is the first DL-based model in predicting match winners from any professional football leagues in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. We believe the results will support the coaching staff and team management for QSL in designing game strategies and improve the overall quality of performance of the players.

Diabetes is one of the leading fatal diseases globally, putting a huge burden on the global healthcare system. Early diagnosis of diabetes is hence, of utmost importance and could save many lives. However, current techniques to determine whether a person has diabetes or has the risk of developing diabetes are primarily reliant upon clinical biomarkers. In this article, we propose a novel deep learning architecture to predict if a person has diabetes or not from a photograph of his/her retina. Using a relatively small-sized dataset, we develop a multi-stage convolutional neural network (CNN)-based model DiaNet that can reach an accuracy level of over 84% on this task, and in doing so, successfully identifies the regions on the retina images that contribute to its decision-making process, as corroborated by the medical experts in the field. This is the first study that highlights the distinguishing capability of the retinal images for diabetes patients in the Qatari population to the best of our knowledge. Comparing the performance of DiaNet against the existing clinical data-based machine learning models, we conclude that the retinal images contain sufficient information to distinguish the Qatari diabetes cohort from the control group. In addition, our study reveals that retinal images may contain prognosis markers for diabetes and other comorbidities like hypertension and ischemic heart disease. The results led us to believe that the inclusion of retinal images into the clinical setup for the diagnosis of diabetes is warranted in the near future.

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the leading cause of death worldwide. People affected by CVDs may go undiagnosed until the occurrence of a serious heart failure event such as stroke, heart attack, and myocardial infraction. In Qatar, there is a lack of studies focusing on CVD diagnosis based on non-invasive methods such as retinal image or dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA). In this study, we aimed at diagnosing CVD using a novel approach integrating information from retinal images and DXA data. We considered an adult Qatari cohort of 500 participants from Qatar Biobank (QBB) with an equal number of participants from the CVD and the control groups. We designed a case-control study with a novel multi-modal (combining data from multiple modalities—DXA and retinal images)—to propose a deep learning (DL)-based technique to distinguish the CVD group from the control group. Uni-modal models based on retinal images and DXA data achieved 75.6% and 77.4% accuracy, respectively. The multi-modal model showed an improved accuracy of 78.3% in classifying CVD group and the control group. We used gradient class activation map (GradCAM) to highlight the areas of interest in the retinal images that influenced the decisions of the proposed DL model most. It was observed that the model focused mostly on the centre of the retinal images where signs of CVD such as hemorrhages were present. This indicates that our model can identify and make use of certain prognosis markers for hypertension and ischemic heart disease. From DXA data, we found higher values for bone mineral density, fat content, muscle mass and bone area across majority of the body parts in CVD group compared to the control group indicating better bone health in the Qatari CVD cohort. This seminal method based on DXA scans and retinal images demonstrate major potentials for the early detection of CVD in a fast and relatively non-invasive manner.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is reported to be the leading cause of mortality in the middle eastern countries, including Qatar. But no comprehensive study has been conducted on the Qatar specific CVD risk factors identification. The objective of this case-control study was to develop machine learning (ML) model distinguishing healthy individuals from people having CVD, which could ultimately reveal the list of potential risk factors associated to CVD in Qatar. To the best of our knowledge, this study considered the largest collection of biomedical measurements representing the anthropometric measurements, clinical biomarkers, bioimpedance, spirometry, VICORDER readings, and behavioral factors of the CVD group from Qatar Biobank (QBB). CatBoost model achieved 93% accuracy, thereby outperforming the existing model for the same purpose. Interestingly, combining multimodal datasets into the proposed ML model outperformed the ML model built upon currently known risk factors for CVD, emphasizing the importance of incorporating other clinical biomarkers into consideration for CVD diagnosis plan. The ablation study on the multimodal dataset from QBB revealed that physio-clinical and bioimpedance measurements have the most distinguishing power to classify these two groups irrespective of gender and age of the participants. Multiple feature subset selection techniques confirmed known CVD risk factors (blood pressure, lipid profile, smoking, sedentary life, and diabetes), and identified potential novel risk factors linked to CVD-related comorbidities such as renal disorder (e.g., creatinine, uric acid, homocysteine, albumin), atherosclerosis (intima media thickness), hypercoagulable state (fibrinogen), and liver function (e.g., alkaline phosphate, gamma-glutamyl transferase). Moreover, the inclusion of the proposed novel factors into the ML model provides better performance than the model with traditional known risk factors for CVD. The association of the proposed risk factors and comorbidities are required to be investigated in clinical setup to understand their role in CVD better. © 2013 IEEE.

Diabetes, affecting more than 500 million individuals worldwide, is the most widespread non-communicable disease, globally. The early identification and effective management of diabetes are crucial for controlling its spread. Currently, the HbA1c test is the gold standard for the detection of diabetes with high confidence. But this is an invasive, expensive pathology test. Therefore, alternative non-invasive and inexpensive methods have been proposed in the literature for the early detection of diabetes.