An automatic sleep disorder detection based on EEG cross-frequency coupling and random forest model.

Objective. Sleep disorders are medical disorders of a subject's sleep architecture and based on their severity, they can interfere with mental, emotional and physical functioning. The most common ones are insomnia, narcolepsy, sleep apnea, bruxism, etc. There is an increased risk of developing sleep disorders in elderly like insomnia, periodic leg movements, rapid eye movement behavior disorders, sleep disorder breathing, etc. Consequently, their accurate diagnosis and classification are important steps towards an early stage treatment that could save the life of a patient.Approach. The electroencephalographic (EEG) signal is the most sensitive and important biosignal, which is able to capture the brain sleep activity that is sensitive to sleep. In this study, we attempt to analyze EEG sleep activity via complementary cross-frequency coupling (CFC) estimates, which further feed a classifier, aiming to discriminate sleep disorders. We adopted an open EEG database with recordings that were grouped into seven sleep disorders and a healthy control. The EEG brain activity from common sensors has been analyzed with two basic types of CFC.Main results. Finally, a random forest (RF) classification model was built on CFC patterns, which were extracted from non-cyclic alternating pattern epochs. Our RFCFCmodel achieved a 74% multiclass accuracy. Both types of CFC, phase-to-amplitude and amplitude-amplitude coupling patterns contribute to the accuracy of the RF model, thus supporting their complementary information.Significance. CFC patterns, in conjunction with the RF classifier proved a valuable biomarker for the classification of sleep disorders.

How random is the random forest? Random forest algorithm on the service of structural imaging biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease: from Alzheimer's disease neuroimaging initiative (ADNI) database.

Neuroinformatics is a fascinating research field that applies computational models and analytical tools to high dimensional experimental neuroscience data for a better understanding of how the brain functions or dysfunctions in brain diseases. Neuroinformaticians work in the intersection of neuroscience and informatics supporting the integration of various sub-disciplines (behavioural neuroscience, genetics, cognitive psychology, etc.) working on brain research. Neuroinformaticians are the pathway of information exchange between informaticians and clinicians for a better understanding of the outcome of computational models and the clinical interpretation of the analysis. Machine learning is one of the most significant computational developments in the last decade giving tools to neuroinformaticians and finally to radiologists and clinicians for an automatic and early diagnosis-prognosis of a brain disease. Random forest (RF) algorithm has been successfully applied to high-dimensional neuroimaging data for feature reduction and also has been applied to classify the clinical label of a subject using single or multi-modal neuroimaging datasets. Our aim was to review the studies where RF was applied to correctly predict the Alzheimer's disease (AD), the conversion from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and its robustness to overfitting, outliers and handling of non-linear data. Finally, we described our RF-based model that gave us the 1st position in an international challenge for automated prediction of MCI from MRI data.

Random forest feature selection, fusion and ensemble strategy: Combining multiple morphological MRI measures to discriminate among healhy elderly, MCI, cMCI and alzheimer's disease patients: From the alzheimer's disease neuroimaging initiative (ADNI) database.

BACKGROUND: In the era of computer-assisted diagnostic tools for various brain diseases, Alzheimer's disease (AD) covers a large percentage of neuroimaging research, with the main scope being its use in daily practice. However, there has been no study attempting to simultaneously discriminate among Healthy Controls (HC), early mild cognitive impairment (MCI), late MCI (cMCI) and stable AD, using features derived from a single modality, namely MRI. NEW METHOD: Based on preprocessed MRI images from the organizers of a neuroimaging challenge,3 we attempted to quantify the prediction accuracy of multiple morphological MRI features to simultaneously discriminate among HC, MCI, cMCI and AD. We explored the efficacy of a novel scheme that includes multiple feature selections via Random Forest from subsets of the whole set of features (e.g. whole set, left/right hemisphere etc.), Random Forest classification using a fusion approach and ensemble classification via majority voting. From the ADNI database, 60 HC, 60 MCI, 60 cMCI and 60 CE were used as a training set with known labels. An extra dataset of 160 subjects (HC: 40, MCI: 40, cMCI: 40 and AD: 40) was used as an external blind validation dataset to evaluate the proposed machine learning scheme. RESULTS: In the second blind dataset, we succeeded in a four-class classification of 61.9% by combining MRI-based features with a Random Forest-based Ensemble Strategy. We achieved the best classification accuracy of all teams that participated in this neuroimaging competition. COMPARISON WITH EXISTING METHOD(S): The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme to simultaneously discriminate among four groups using morphological MRI features for the very first time in the literature. CONCLUSIONS: Hence, the proposed machine learning scheme can be used to define single and multi-modal biomarkers for AD.

A Multimodal Analytics Platform for Journalists Analyzing Large-Scale, Heterogeneous Multilingual, and Multimedia Content.

Analysts and journalists face the problem of having to deal with very large, heterogeneous, and multilingual data volumes that need to be analyzed, understood, and aggregated. Automated and simplified editorial and authoring process could significantly reduce time, labor, and costs. Therefore, there is a need for unified access to multilingual and multicultural news story material, beyond the level of a nation, ensuring context-aware, spatiotemporal, and semantic interpretation, correlating also and summarizing the interpreted material into a coherent gist. In this paper, we present a platform integrating multimodal analytics techniques, which are able to support journalists in handling large streams of real-time and diverse information. Specifically, the platform automatically crawls and indexes multilingual and multimedia information from heterogeneous resources. Textual information is automatically summarized and can be translated (on demand) into the language of the journalist. High-level information is extracted from both textual and multimedia content for fast inspection using concept clouds. The textual and multimedia content is semantically integrated and indexed using a common representation, to be accessible through a web-based search engine. The evaluation of the proposed platform was performed by several groups of journalists revealing satisfaction from the user side.