Alaa F. Sheta

Work place: Computer Science Department, Southern Connecticut State University, CT, USA

E-mail: shetaa1@southernct.edu

Website: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3727-6276

Research Interests:

Biography

Dr. Alaa F. Sheta is a tenured Professor at the Computer Science Department, Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven, CT, USA. Alaa Sheta earned a Ph.D. in Information Technology from the Computer Science Department at the School of Information Technology and Engineering at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA, in 1997. He earned his B.E. and M.Sc. degrees in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Cairo University, Faculty of Engineering, in 1988 and 1994, respectively. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 journal and conference papers, nine book chapters, and three books. He supervised more than 30 master's and Ph.D. students. He is a senior member of the IEEE Society. He is an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA) and the International Journal of Computational Complexity and Intelligent Algorithms (IJCCIA). His research includes meta-heuristic search algorithms, machine learning, data mining, image processing, deep learning, and robotics.

Author Articles
Evolutionary Neural Network for Obstructive Sleep Apnea Diagnosis Using GA, PSO, and CSA

By Alaa F. Sheta Salim Surani

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijeme.2026.05.02, Pub. Date: 8 Oct. 2026

Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is a well-known sleep disorder that can lead to major health consequences if
left untreated. The traditional diagnostic method, polysomnography, is precise but costly and labor-intensive. This research presents an Evolutionary Feedforward Neural Network (FFNN) optimized using a Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), and the Crow Search Algorithm (CSA) to diagnose OSA. We utilized a dataset comprising demographic and physical measurements. The adopted features include age, sex, weight (lb), height (in), neck circumference, body mass index (BMI > 30), (Neck > 17), airway evaluation via the modified Friedman grade (MF > 2), the Berlin apnea-hypopnea questionnaire (BAN), and the identification of apnea as indicated by the apnea hypopnea index (AHI ≥ 15). We used this methodology to optimize the FFNN’s weights and biases, improving generalization and avoiding local minima that traditional backpropagation can trap the model in. The results indicate that GA, PSO, and CSA achieved competitive, comparable performance, with PSO showing a marginally better performance across most evaluation metrics, rather than a significant superiority of any single optimization method.

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