Enhancing the Classification of Imbalanced Arabic Medical Questions Using DeepSMOTE

The growing demand for telemedicine has highlighted the need for automated healthcare services, particularly in medical question classification. This study presents a deep learning model designed to address key challenges in telemedicine, including class imbalance and accurate routing of Arabic medi...

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Main Authors: Bushra Al-Smadi, Bassam Hammo, Hossam Faris, Pedro A. Castillo
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2025-04-01
Series:AI
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Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2673-2688/6/4/77
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author Bushra Al-Smadi
Bassam Hammo
Hossam Faris
Pedro A. Castillo
author_facet Bushra Al-Smadi
Bassam Hammo
Hossam Faris
Pedro A. Castillo
author_sort Bushra Al-Smadi
collection DOAJ
description The growing demand for telemedicine has highlighted the need for automated healthcare services, particularly in medical question classification. This study presents a deep learning model designed to address key challenges in telemedicine, including class imbalance and accurate routing of Arabic medical questions to the correct specialties. The model combines AraBERTv0.2-Twitter, fine-tuned for informal Arabic, with Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) networks to capture deep semantic relationships in medical text. We used a labeled dataset of 5000 Arabic consultation records from Altibbi, covering five key medical specialties selected for their clinical relevance and frequency. The data underwent preprocessing to remove noise and normalize text. We employed stratified sampling to ensure representative distribution across the selected medical specialties. We evaluate multiple models using macro precision, macro recall, macro F1-score, weighted F1-score, and G-Mean. Our results demonstrate that DeepSMOTE combined with cross-entropy loss achieves the best performance. The findings offer statistically significant improvements and have practical implications for improving screening and patient routing in telemedicine platforms.
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spelling doaj-art-60c73cc044a14b359ff94de776a42d082025-08-20T03:14:20ZengMDPI AGAI2673-26882025-04-01647710.3390/ai6040077Enhancing the Classification of Imbalanced Arabic Medical Questions Using DeepSMOTEBushra Al-Smadi0Bassam Hammo1Hossam Faris2Pedro A. Castillo3King Abdullah II School of Information Technology, The University of Jordan, Amman 11942, JordanKing Abdullah II School of Information Technology, The University of Jordan, Amman 11942, JordanKing Abdullah II School of Information Technology, The University of Jordan, Amman 11942, JordanDepartment of Computer Engineering, Automatics and Robotics, Higher Technical School of Computer Sciences and Telecommunications Engineering (ETSIIT)-Communication and Information Technologies Researching Centre (CITIC), University of Granada, 18071 Granada, SpainThe growing demand for telemedicine has highlighted the need for automated healthcare services, particularly in medical question classification. This study presents a deep learning model designed to address key challenges in telemedicine, including class imbalance and accurate routing of Arabic medical questions to the correct specialties. The model combines AraBERTv0.2-Twitter, fine-tuned for informal Arabic, with Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) networks to capture deep semantic relationships in medical text. We used a labeled dataset of 5000 Arabic consultation records from Altibbi, covering five key medical specialties selected for their clinical relevance and frequency. The data underwent preprocessing to remove noise and normalize text. We employed stratified sampling to ensure representative distribution across the selected medical specialties. We evaluate multiple models using macro precision, macro recall, macro F1-score, weighted F1-score, and G-Mean. Our results demonstrate that DeepSMOTE combined with cross-entropy loss achieves the best performance. The findings offer statistically significant improvements and have practical implications for improving screening and patient routing in telemedicine platforms.https://www.mdpi.com/2673-2688/6/4/77DeepSMOTEmulti-class classificationoversampling techniquesmedical questionsArabic language
spellingShingle Bushra Al-Smadi
Bassam Hammo
Hossam Faris
Pedro A. Castillo
Enhancing the Classification of Imbalanced Arabic Medical Questions Using DeepSMOTE
AI
DeepSMOTE
multi-class classification
oversampling techniques
medical questions
Arabic language
title Enhancing the Classification of Imbalanced Arabic Medical Questions Using DeepSMOTE
title_full Enhancing the Classification of Imbalanced Arabic Medical Questions Using DeepSMOTE
title_fullStr Enhancing the Classification of Imbalanced Arabic Medical Questions Using DeepSMOTE
title_full_unstemmed Enhancing the Classification of Imbalanced Arabic Medical Questions Using DeepSMOTE
title_short Enhancing the Classification of Imbalanced Arabic Medical Questions Using DeepSMOTE
title_sort enhancing the classification of imbalanced arabic medical questions using deepsmote
topic DeepSMOTE
multi-class classification
oversampling techniques
medical questions
Arabic language
url https://www.mdpi.com/2673-2688/6/4/77
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