Constructive Fuzzy Cognitive Map for Depression Severity Estimation.

Depression is a common and serious medical disorder that negatively affects the mood and the emotions of people, especially adolescents. In this paper, a novel framework for automatically creating Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) is proposed. It is applied for the estimation of the severity of depression among adolescents, based on their electroencephalogram (EEG). The introduced Constructive FCM (CFCM) utilizes features extracted by a Constructive Fuzzy Representation Model (CFRM), which conduces to detect in a more intuitive way the cause-and-effect relationships between the brain activity and depression. CFCM contributes to limiting the participation of experts, and the manual interventions in the traditional construction of FCMs, it provides an embedded mechanism for dimensionality reduction, and it constitutes an inherently interpretable approach to decision making, while being uncertainty-aware and simple to implement. The results of the experiments, using a recent publicly available dataset, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and highlight its advantages.

A Constructive Fuzzy Representation Model for Heart Data Classification.

The early detection of Heart Disease (HD) and the prediction of Heart Failure (HF) via telemonitoring and can contribute to the reduction of patients' mortality and morbidity as well as to the reduction of respective treatment costs. In this study we propose a novel classification model based on fuzzy logic applied in the context of HD detection and HF prediction. The proposed model considers that data can be represented by fuzzy phrases constructed from fuzzy words, which are fuzzy sets derived from data. Advantages of this approach include the robustness of data classification, as well as an intuitive way for feature selection. The accuracy of the proposed model is investigated on real home telemonitoring data and a publicly available dataset from UCI.

The future of capsule endoscopy in clinical practice: from diagnostic to therapeutic experimental prototype capsules.

Capsule endoscopy (CE) is indicated as a first-line clinical examination for the detection of small-bowel pathology, and there is an ever-growing drive for it to become a method for the screening of the entire gastrointestinal tract (GI). Although CE's main function is diagnosis, the research for therapeutic capabilities has intensified to make therapeutic capsule endoscopy (TCE) a target within reach. This manuscript presents the research evolution of CE and TCE through the last 5 years and describes notable problems, as well as clinical and technological challenges to overcome. This review also reports the state-of-the-art of capsule devices with a focus on CE research prototypes promising an enhanced diagnostic yield (DY) and treatment. Lastly, this article provides an overview of the research progress made in software for enhancing DY by increasing the accuracy of abnormality detection and lesion localisation.

Follow-up on: optimizing lesion detection in small bowel capsule endoscopy and beyond: from present problems to future solutions.

INTRODUCTION: This review presents noteworthy advances in clinical and experimental Capsule Endoscopy (CE), focusing on the progress that has been reported over the last 5 years since our previous review on the subject. Areas covered: This study presents the commercially available CE platforms, as well as the advances made in optimizing the diagnostic capabilities of CE. The latter includes recent concept and prototype capsule endoscopes, medical approaches to improve diagnostic yield, and progress in software for enhancing visualization, abnormality detection, and lesion localization. Expert commentary: Currently, moving through the second decade of CE evolution, there are still several open issues and remarkable challenges to overcome.

DINOSARC: Color Features Based on Selective Aggregation of Chromatic Image Components for Wireless Capsule Endoscopy.

Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) is a noninvasive diagnostic technique enabling the inspection of the whole gastrointestinal (GI) tract by capturing and wirelessly transmitting thousands of color images. Proprietary software "stitches" the images into videos for examination by accredited readers. However, the videos produced are of large length and consequently the reading task becomes harder and more prone to human errors. Automating the WCE reading process could contribute in both the reduction of the examination time and the improvement of its diagnostic accuracy. In this paper, we present a novel feature extraction methodology for automated WCE image analysis. It aims at discriminating various kinds of abnormalities from the normal contents of WCE images, in a machine learning-based classification framework. The extraction of the proposed features involves an unsupervised color-based saliency detection scheme which, unlike current approaches, combines both point and region-level saliency information and the estimation of local and global image color descriptors. The salient point detection process involves estimation of DIstaNces On Selective Aggregation of chRomatic image Components (DINOSARC). The descriptors are extracted from superpixels by coevaluating both point and region-level information. The main conclusions of the experiments performed on a publicly available dataset of WCE images are (a) the proposed salient point detection scheme results in significantly less and more relevant salient points; (b) the proposed descriptors are more discriminative than relevant state-of-the-art descriptors, promising a wider adoption of the proposed approach for computer-aided diagnosis in WCE.

Detecting and Locating Gastrointestinal Anomalies Using Deep Learning and Iterative Cluster Unification.

This paper proposes a novel methodology for automatic detection and localization of gastrointestinal (GI) anomalies in endoscopic video frame sequences. Training is performed with weakly annotated images, using only image-level, semantic labels instead of detailed, and pixel-level annotations. This makes it a cost-effective approach for the analysis of large videoendoscopy repositories. Other advantages of the proposed methodology include its capability to suggest possible locations of GI anomalies within the video frames, and its generality, in the sense that abnormal frame detection is based on automatically derived image features. It is implemented in three phases: 1) it classifies the video frames into abnormal or normal using a weakly supervised convolutional neural network (WCNN) architecture; 2) detects salient points from deeper WCNN layers, using a deep saliency detection algorithm; and 3) localizes GI anomalies using an iterative cluster unification (ICU) algorithm. ICU is based on a pointwise cross-feature-map (PCFM) descriptor extracted locally from the detected salient points using information derived from the WCNN. Results, from extensive experimentation using publicly available collections of gastrointestinal endoscopy video frames, are presented. The data sets used include a variety of GI anomalies. Both anomaly detection and localization performance achieved, in terms of the area under receiver operating characteristic (AUC), were >80%. The highest AUC for anomaly detection was obtained on conventional gastroscopy images, reaching 96%, and the highest AUC for anomaly localization was obtained on wireless capsule endoscopy images, reaching 88%.