en 4-Biomedical Signal & Image Processing Biomedical Signal & Image Processing Research Paper Research Paper <span style="font-size:10.0pt"><span new="" roman="" style="font-family:" times="">Hepatitis C virus (HCV) detection is a critical aspect of early intervention and effective management of the disease. This paper presents a comprehensive study focused on enhancing the detection accuracy of HCV through the integration of advanced techniques - SMOTE, Optuna, and SHAP - alongside extensive exploratory data analysis (EDA). The study addresses class imbalance using Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE), optimizes model performance with Optuna for hyperparameter tuning, and provides model interpretability using SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations). EDA is leveraged to gain valuable insights into the dataset&#39;s characteristics, ensuring robust data preprocessing and feature engineering. The results show 97% improved HCV detection performance, highlighting the efficacy of the proposed methodology in medical diagnostics and aiding healthcare professionals in making informed clinical decisions.</span></span> Hepatitis C virus, Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique, exploratory data analysis, SHapley Additive exPlanations, machine learning, classification algorithms, OPTUNA. 44 60 http://ijeee.iust.ac.ir/browse.php?a_code=A-10-5305-1&slc_lang=en&sid=1 S.M Mehzabeen mehzabeen@svce.ac.in 1800319475328460017200 1800319475328460017200 No Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering, Sriperumbudur, India R Gayathri rgayathri@svce.ac.in 1800319475328460017201 1800319475328460017201 No Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering, Sriperumbudur, India Pattunnarajam Paramasaivam pattunarajamp@svce.ac.in 1800319475328460017202 1800319475328460017202 Yes Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering, Sriperumbudur, India Ramya A ramyaa@svce.ac.in 1800319475328460017203 1800319475328460017203 No Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering, Sriperumbudur, India