SentinelSphere: AI-Driven Cybersecurity Platform Combining Threat Detection with Security Awareness

The study aims to address critical challenges in network security, particularly the limitations of traditional intrusion detection systems (IDS) in terms of adaptability, detection precision, and high false positive rates in dynamic network environments. A novel hybrid IDS model integrating the Flower Pollination Algorithm (FPA), Cheetah Optimization Algorithm (COA), and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) is proposed to enhance detection accuracy, reduce false positives, and optimize feature selection, anomaly detection, and rule adaptation. The hybrid FPA-COA-ANN model combines the optimization capabilities of FPA and COA with the predictive power of ANN. The model was evaluated using five benchmark datasets—CICIDS-2017, TII-SSRC, Lu-flow, NSL-KDD, and WSN-DS. Key performance metrics were analysed to assess the model’s effectiveness in detecting malicious activities in complex network traffic patterns. The hybrid model demonstrated superior performance compared to existing IDS approaches. It achieved accuracy rates of 0.99 on CICIDS-2017, 1.00 on TII-SSRC, 1.00 on Lu-flow, 0.99 on NSL-KDD, and 0.93 on WSN-DS. The results highlight significant improvements in detection precision and adaptability, alongside a reduction in false positive rates, showcasing the model’s robustness and scalability for real-time threat detection. The proposed hybrid FPA-COA-ANN model effectively mitigates the limitations of traditional IDS by offering a robust, scalable, and efficient solution for real-time network threat detection. Its high accuracy and adaptability across diverse benchmark datasets underscore its potential as a critical tool for enhancing cybersecurity defences in dynamic and complex environments.

Early detection of lung cancer is crucial in reducing mortality. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) may be a viable imaging technique for lung cancer detection. Numerous lung nodule detection methods have been studied for computed tomography (CT) images. However, to the best of our knowledge, no detection methods have been carried out for the MR images. In this paper, a lung nodule detection method based on deep learning is proposed for thoracic MR images. With parameter optimizing, spatial three-channel input construction, and transfer learning, a faster R-convolution neural network (CNN) is designed to locate the lung nodule region. Then, a false positive (FP) reduction scheme based on anatomical characteristics is designed to reduce FPs and preserve the true nodule. The proposed method is tested on 142 T2-weighted MR scans from the First Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University. The sensitivity of the proposed method is 85.2% with 3.47 FPs per scan. The experimental results demonstrate that the designed faster R-CNN network and the FP reduction scheme are effective in the lung nodule detection and the FP reduction for MR images.

We are developing a computer-aided detection system to assist radiologists in the detection of lung nodules on thoracic computed tomography (CT) images. The purpose of this study was to improve the false-positive (FP) reduction stage of our algorithm by developing features that extract three-dimensional (3D) shape information from volumes of interest identified in the prescreening stage. We formulated 3D gradient field descriptors, and derived 19 gradient field features from their statistics. Six ellipsoid features were obtained by computing the lengths and the length ratios of the principal axes of an ellipsoid fitted to a segmented object. Both the gradient field features and the ellipsoid features were designed to distinguish spherical objects such as lung nodules from elongated objects such as vessels. The FP reduction performance in this new 25-dimensional feature space was compared to the performance in a 19-dimensional space that consisted of features extracted using previously developed methods. The performance in the 44-dimensional combined feature space was also evaluated. Linear discriminant analysis with stepwise feature selection was used for classification. The parameters used for feature selection were optimized using the simplex algorithm. Training and testing were performed using a leave-one-patient-out scheme. The FP reduction performances in different feature spaces were evaluated by using the area Az under the receiver operating characteristic curve and the number of FPs per CT section at a given sensitivity as accuracy measures. Our data set consisted of 82 CT scans (3551 axial sections) from 56 patients with section thickness ranging from 1.0 to 2.5 mm. Our prescreening algorithm detected 111 of the 116 solid nodules (nodule size: 3.0-30.6 mm) marked by experienced thoracic radiologists. The test Az values were 0.95 +/- 0.01, 0.88 +/- 0.02, and 0.94 +/- 0.01 in the new, previous, and combined feature spaces, respectively. The number of FPs per section at 80% sensitivity in these three feature spaces were 0.37, 1.61, and 0.34, respectively. The improvement in the test Az with the 25 new features was statistically significant (p<0.0001) compared to that with the previous 19 features alone.

We are developing a computer-aided detection system to aid radiologists in diagnosing lung cancer in thoracic computed tomographic (CT) images. The purpose of this study was to improve the false-positive (FP) reduction stage of our algorithm by developing and incorporating a gradient field technique. This technique extracts 3D shape information from the gray-scale values within a volume of interest. The gradient field feature values are higher for spherical objects, and lower for elongated and irregularly-shaped objects. A data set of 55 thin CT scans from 40 patients was used to evaluate the usefulness of the gradient field technique. After initial nodule candidate detection and rule-based first stage FP reduction, there were 3487 FP and 65 true positive (TP) objects in our data set. Linear discriminant classifiers with and without the gradient field feature were designed for the second stage FP reduction. The accuracy of these classifiers was evaluated using the area Az under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. The Az values were 0.93 and 0.91 with and without the gradient field feature, respectively. The improvement with the gradient field feature was statistically significant (p=0.01).

Improved AF rhythm discrimination using QRS morphology

Modern enterprise systems are now based on cloud-native architectures relying on microservices, containers, and orchestration systems, such as Kubernetes. Despite the scalability, resilience, and agility of microservices, they expand the attack surface which exposes the cloud-native applications to advanced threats. In such environments, traditional rule-based security systems are unable to keep up with dynamic load distribution, zero-day attacks and distributed attack vectors. Threat-detection solutions with Artificial Intelligence (AI) have become a promising area to secure microservices using machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and anomaly detection models. The present paper provides a review of AI-based threat detection models in microservices on the cloud that cover supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning methods. It discusses the major applications including intrusion detection, API traffic anomaly detection, container runtime protection, and workload behavior analysis. The AI-powered systems will improve the detection rates, false positives, and provide dynamic immunity to new cyber threats. The paper also identifies the implementation framework using AI with service meshes, observability tools, and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems. Fintech, healthcare, and e-commerce case studies show the feasibility of AI-based detection in practice in cloud-native settings. In spite of those developments, there are still issues related to data quality, explainability, model drift and adherence to privacy requirements. The article highlights the importance of explainable AI (XAI), federated learning to achieve collaborative defense, and combining with zero-trust architecture. Microservice systems that combine predictive AI models with autonomous response systems are self-healing microservice systems of the future. With resilient, adaptive, and trustworthy cloud-native applications, organizations can stay in the era of more advanced cyberattacks by securing microservices with AI-driven threat detection.

This paper offers a critical review of the applications of AI in cybersecurity, focusing on the recent trends of automation in threat detection, enhancement of response strategies, and prediction of vulnerabilities. The methodology is based on a thorough analysis of empirical studies up to 2021 as per the efficiency of AI malware detection, insider threat identification, and mitigation of zero-day vulnerabilities. In particular, machine learning- and deep learning-based methodologies of artificial intelligence ensure clear advantages over conventional models concerning the precision in detection and reduction of false positives. However, challenges persist regarding explainability, scalability, and ethical concerns around data bias and quality. Finally, this paper concludes by pointing out some areas of future research with regard to needing XAI techniques and methods related to bias reduction to establish better trust in the efficacy of AI-driven cybersecurity frameworks.

The increasing complexity and sophistication of cyber threats underscore the critical need for advanced threat detection mechanisms within Security Operations Centers (SOCs) to effectively mitigate risks and enhance cybersecurity resilience. This study enhances the capabilities of Wazuh, an open-source Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system, by addressing its primary limitation: high false-positive rates in rule-based detection. We propose a hybrid approach that integrates machine learning (ML) techniques—specifically, Random Forest (RF) and DBSCAN—into Wazuh’s detection pipeline to improve both accuracy and operational efficiency. Experimental results show that RF achieves 97.2% accuracy, while DBSCAN yields 91.06% accuracy with a false-positive rate of 0.0821, significantly improving alert quality. Real-time deployment requirements are rigorously evaluated, with all models maintaining end-to-end processing latencies below 100 milliseconds and 95% of events processed within 500 milliseconds. Scalability testing confirms linear performance up to 500 events per second, with an average processing latency of 45 milliseconds under typical SOC workloads. This integration demonstrates a practical, resource-efficient solution for enhancing real-time threat detection in modern cybersecurity environments.

For the purpose of accurate and efficient mass detection in full-field digital mammograms, weproposeamethodfor automated mass detection that consists oftwostages: suspicious region localization and false-positive (FP) reduction, by classifying these regions into mass and non-mass regions (normal tissues). In the first stage, the density of the wavelet coefficients based on Quincunx Lifting Scheme (DWC-QLS) is used to find suspicious regions (regions of interest, ROIs) in full mammograms. In the second stage, a patch-based CNN classifier is developed as an FP reduction to classify the suspicious regions. The main aim of this stage is to reduce the false-positive suspicious regions while keeping the true-positive suspicious regions. To further improve the performance of the FP reduction, the effectiveness of different transfer learning strategies is further explored and the best fine-tuning strategy in training InceptionV3 model is determined experimentally. The experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve an overall performance of 0.98 TPR @1.43 FPI on the INbreast database. In addition, the suggested segmentation method detects the mass location with 100% sensitivity and average of 5.4 false positives per image. Based on the obtained results,the introduced method was able to successfully detectand classify suspicious regions in digital mammograms and provide better TPR and FPI results in comparison with other state-of-the-art method.

In recent years, with increasing use of internet the computer systems are facing many number of security issues. Intrusion detection system (IDS) is one of the principal components of any information security system. Identification of anomalous activity in computer network is first step in identifying the threat to information system. Our focus is mainly on Genetic algorithm (GA) based anomaly detection technique, as GA is one of the most effective evolutionary techniques for machine learning. In this paper Genetic algorithm is applied for network intrusion detection. Our approach for optimization specifically focusing on false positive rate. Reduction in false positive rate also improves accuracy and performance. The limitation of other techniques of accuracy, false positive rates has been addressed in this paper. Experimental results show the efficient detection rates based on KDD99cup datasets which is a standard dataset for intrusion detection.

Multiview two-dimensional (2D) convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and three-dimensional (3D) CNNs have been successfully used for analyzing volumetric data in many state-of-the-art medical imaging applications. We propose an alternative modular framework that analyzes volumetric data with an approach that is analogous to radiologists' interpretation, and apply the framework to reduce false positives that are generated in computer-aided detection (CADe) systems for pulmonary nodules in thoracic computed tomography (CT) scans. In our approach, a deep network consisting of 2D CNNs first processes slices individually. The features extracted in this stage are then passed to a recurrent neural network (RNN), thereby modeling consecutive slices as a sequence of temporal data and capturing the contextual information across all three dimensions in the volume of interest. Outputs of the RNN layer are weighed before the final fully connected layer, enabling the network to scale the importance of different slices within a volume of interest in an end-to-end training framework. We validated the proposed architecture on the false positive reduction track of the lung nodule analysis (LUNA) challenge for pulmonary nodule detection in chest CT scans, and obtained competitive results compared to 3D CNNs. Our results show that the proposed approach can encode the 3D information in volumetric data effectively by achieving a sensitivity >0.8 with just 1/8 false positives per scan. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of temporal analysis of volumetric images for the application of false positive reduction in chest CT scans and show that state-of-the-art 2D architectures from the literature can be directly applied to analyzing volumetric medical data. As newer and better 2D architectures are being developed at a much faster rate compared to 3D architectures, our approach makes it easy to obtain state-of-the-art performance on volumetric data using new 2D architectures.

This study presents an advanced data augmentation framework to enhance fault diagnostics in industrial centrifugal pumps using vibration data. The proposed framework addresses the challenge of insufficient defect data in industrial settings by integrating traditional augmentation techniques, such as Gaussian noise (GN) and signal stretching (SS), with advanced models, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, Autoencoders (AE), and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Our approach significantly improves the robustness and accuracy of machine learning (ML) models for fault detection and classification. Key findings demonstrate a marked reduction in false positives and a substantial increase in fault detection rates, particularly in complex operational scenarios where traditional statistical methods may fall short. The experimental results underscore the effectiveness of combining these augmentation techniques, achieving up to a 30% improvement in fault detection accuracy and a 25% reduction in false positives compared to baseline models. These improvements highlight the practical value of the proposed framework in ensuring reliable operation and the predictive maintenance of centrifugal pumps in diverse industrial environments.

The authors presented a novel system for automated nodule detection in lung CT exams. The approach is based on (1) a lung tissue segmentation preprocessing step, composed of histogram thresholding, seeded region growing, and mathematical morphology; (2) a filtering step, whose aim is the preliminary detection of candidate nodules (via 3D fast radial filtering) and estimation of their geometrical features (via scale space analysis); and (3) a false positive reduction (FPR) step, comprising a heuristic FPR, which applies thresholds based on geometrical features, and a supervised FPR, which is based on support vector machines classification, which in turn, is enhanced by a feature extraction algorithm based on maximum intensity projection processing and Zernike moments. The system was validated on 154 chest axial CT exams provided by the lung image database consortium public database. The authors obtained correct detection of 71% of nodules marked by all radiologists, with a false positive rate of 6.5 false positives per patient (FP/patient). A higher specificity of 2.5 FP/patient was reached with a sensitivity of 60%. An independent test on the ANODE09 competition database obtained an overall score of 0.310. The system shows a novel approach to the problem of lung nodule detection in CT scans: It relies on filtering techniques, image transforms, and descriptors rather than region growing and nodule segmentation, and the results are comparable to those of other recent systems in literature and show little dependency on the different types of nodules, which is a good sign of robustness.

The purpose of this study was to propose and implement a computer aided detection (CADe) tool for breast tomosynthesis. This task was accomplished in two stages-a highly sensitive mass detector followed by a false positive (FP) reduction stage. Breast tomosynthesis data from 100 human subject cases were used, of which 25 subjects had one or more mass lesions and the rest were normal. For stage 1, filter parameters were optimized via a grid search. The CADe identified suspicious locations were reconstructed to yield 3D CADe volumes of interest. The first stage yielded a maximum sensitivity of 93% with 7.7 FPs/breast volume. Unlike traditional CADe algorithms in which the second stage FP reduction is done via feature extraction and analysis, instead information theory principles were used with mutual information as a similarity metric. Three schemes were proposed, all using leave-one-case-out cross validation sampling. The three schemes, A, B, and C, differed in the composition of their knowledge base of regions of interest (ROIs). Scheme A's knowledge base was comprised of all the mass and FP ROIs generated by the first stage of the algorithm. Scheme B had a knowledge base that contained information from mass ROIs and randomly extracted normal ROIs. Scheme C had information from three sources of information-masses, FPs, and normal ROIs. Also, performance was assessed as a function of the composition of the knowledge base in terms of the number of FP or normal ROIs needed by the system to reach optimal performance. The results indicated that the knowledge base needed no more than 20 times as many FPs and 30 times as many normal ROIs as masses to attain maximal performance. The best overall system performance was 85% sensitivity with 2.4 FPs per breast volume for scheme A, 3.6 FPs per breast volume for scheme B, and 3 FPs per breast volume for scheme C.

One of the limitations of the current computer-aided detection (CAD) of polyps in CT colonography (CTC) is a relatively large number of false-positive (FP) detections. Rectal tubes (RTs) are one of the typical sources of FPs because a portion of a RT, especially a portion of a bulbous tip, often exhibits a cap-like shape that closely mimics the appearance of a small polyp. Radiologists can easily recognize and dismiss RT-induced FPs; thus, they may lose their confidence in CAD as an effective tool if the CAD scheme generates such "obvious" FPs due to RTs consistently. In addition, RT-induced FPs may distract radiologists from less common true positives in the rectum. Therefore, removal RT-induced FPs as well as other types of FPs is desirable while maintaining a high sensitivity in the detection of polyps. We developed a three-dimensional (3D) massive-training artificial neural network (MTANN) for distinction between polyps and RTs in 3D CTC volumetric data. The 3D MTANN is a supervised volume-processing technique which is trained with input CTC volumes and the corresponding "teaching" volumes. The teaching volume for a polyp contains a 3D Gaussian distribution, and that for a RT contains zeros for enhancement of polyps and suppression of RTs, respectively. For distinction between polyps and nonpolyps including RTs, a 3D scoring method based on a 3D Gaussian weighting function is applied to the output of the trained 3D MTANN. Our database consisted of CTC examinations of 73 patients, scanned in both supine and prone positions (146 CTC data sets in total), with optical colonoscopy as a reference standard for the presence of polyps. Fifteen patients had 28 polyps, 15 of which were 5-9 mm and 13 were 10-25 mm in size. These CTC cases were subjected to our previously reported CAD scheme that included centerline-based segmentation of the colon, shape-based detection of polyps, and reduction of FPs by use of a Bayesian neural network based on geometric and texture features. Application of this CAD scheme yielded 96.4% (27/28) by-polyp sensitivity with 3.1 (224/73) FPs per patient, among which 20 FPs were caused by RTs. To eliminate the FPs due to RTs and possibly other normal structures, we trained a 3D MTANN with ten representative polyps and ten RTs, and applied the trained 3D MTANN to the above CAD true- and false-positive detections. In the output volumes of the 3D MTANN, polyps were represented by distributions of bright voxels, whereas RTs and other normal structures partly similar to RTs appeared as darker voxels, indicating the ability of the 3D MTANN to suppress RTs as well as other normal structures effectively. Application of the 3D MTANN to the CAD detections showed that the 3D MTANN eliminated all RT-induced 20 FPs, as well as 53 FPs due to other causes, without removal of any true positives. Overall, the 3D MTANN was able to reduce the FP rate of the CAD scheme from 3.1 to 2.1 FPs per patient (33% reduction), while the original by-polyp sensitivity of 96.4% was maintained.