Advancements in non-invasive microwave brain stimulation: A comprehensive survey.

This survey provides a comprehensive insight into the world of non-invasive brain stimulation and focuses on the evolving landscape of deep brain stimulation through microwave research. Non-invasive brain stimulation techniques provide new prospects for comprehending and treating neurological disorders. We investigate the methods shaping the future of deep brain stimulation, emphasizing the role of microwave technology in this transformative journey. Specifically, we explore antenna structures and optimization strategies to enhance the efficiency of high-frequency microwave stimulation. These advancements can potentially revolutionize the field by providing a safer and more precise means of modulating neural activity. Furthermore, we address the challenges that researchers currently face in the realm of microwave brain stimulation. From safety concerns to methodological intricacies, this survey outlines the barriers that must be overcome to fully unlock the potential of this technology. This survey serves as a roadmap for advancing research in microwave brain stimulation, pointing out potential directions and innovations that promise to reshape the field.

Constructing bodily emotion maps based on high-density body surface potentials for psychophysiological computing.

Emotion is a complex physiological and psychological activity, accompanied by subjective physiological sensations and objective physiological changes. The body sensation map describes the changes in body sensation associated with emotion in a topographic manner, but it relies on subjective evaluations from participants. Physiological signals are a more reliable measure of emotion, but most research focuses on the central nervous system, neglecting the importance of the peripheral nervous system. In this study, a body surface potential mapping (BSPM) system was constructed, and an experiment was designed to induce emotions and obtain high-density body surface potential information under negative and non-negative emotions. Then, by constructing and analyzing the functional connectivity network of BSPs, the high-density electrophysiological characteristics are obtained and visualized as bodily emotion maps. The results showed that the functional connectivity network of BSPs under negative emotions had denser connections, and emotion maps based on local clustering coefficient (LCC) are consistent with BSMs under negative emotions. in addition, our features can classify negative and non-negative emotions with the highest classification accuracy of 80.77%. In conclusion, this study constructs an emotion map based on high-density BSPs, which offers a novel approach to psychophysiological computing.

A Novel Algorithmic Structure of EEG Channel Attention Combined With Swin Transformer for Motor Patterns Classification.

With the development of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) technologies, EEG-based BCI applications have been deployed for medical purposes. Motor imagery (MI), applied to promote neural rehabilitation for stroke patients, is among the most common BCI paradigms that. The Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, encompassing an extensive range of channels, render the training dataset a high-dimensional construct. This high dimensionality, inherent in such a dataset, tends to challenge traditional deep learning approaches, causing them to potentially disregard the intrinsic correlations amongst these channels. Such an oversight often culminates in erroneous data classification, presenting a significant drawback of these conventional methodologies. In our study, we propose a novel algorithmic structure of EEG channel-attention combined with Swin Transformer for motor pattern recognition in BCI rehabilitation. Effectively, the self-attention module from transformer architecture could captures temporal-spectral-spatial features hidden in EEG data. The experimental results verify that our proposed methods outperformed other state-of-art approaches with the average accuracy of 87.67%. It is implied that our method can extract high-level and latent connections among temporal-spectral features in contrast to traditional deep learning methods. This paper demonstrates that channel-attention combined with Swin Transformer methods has great potential for implementing high-performance motor pattern-based BCI systems.

Computer-Aided Ankle Ligament Injury Diagnosis from Magnetic Resonance Images Using Machine Learning Techniques.

Ankle injuries caused by the Anterior Talofibular Ligament (ATFL) are the most common type of injury. Thus, finding new ways to analyze these injuries through novel technologies is critical for assisting medical diagnosis and, as a result, reducing the subjectivity of this process. As a result, the purpose of this study is to compare the ability of specialists to diagnose lateral tibial tuberosity advancement (LTTA) injury using computer vision analysis on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The experiments were carried out on a database obtained from the Vue PACS-Carestream software, which contained 132 images of ATFL and normal (healthy) ankles. Because there were only a few images, image augmentation techniques was used to increase the number of images in the database. Following that, various feature extraction algorithms (GLCM, LBP, and HU invariant moments) and classifiers such as Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Support Vector Machine (SVM), k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN), and Random Forest (RF) were used. Based on the results from this analysis, for cases that lack clear morphologies, the method delivers a hit rate of 85.03% with an increase of 22% over the human expert-based analysis.

ECG Measurement Uncertainty Based on Monte Carlo Approach: An Effective Analysis for a Successful Cardiac Health Monitoring System.

Measurement uncertainty is one of the widespread concepts applied in scientific works, particularly to estimate the accuracy of measurement results and to evaluate the conformity of products and processes. In this work, we propose a methodology to analyze the performance of measurement systems existing in the design phases, based on a probabilistic approach, by applying the Monte Carlo method (MCM). With this approach, it is feasible to identify the dominant contributing factors of imprecision in the evaluated system. In the design phase, this information can be used to identify where the most effective attention is required to improve the performance of equipment. This methodology was applied over a simulated electrocardiogram (ECG), for which a measurement uncertainty of the order of 3.54% of the measured value was estimated, with a confidence level of 95%. For this simulation, the ECG computational model was categorized into two modules: the preamplifier and the final stage. The outcomes of the analysis show that the preamplifier module had a greater influence on the measurement results over the final stage module, which indicates that interventions in the first module would promote more significant performance improvements in the system. Finally, it was identified that the main source of ECG measurement uncertainty is related to the measurand, focused towards the objective of better characterization of the metrological behavior of the measurements in the ECG.

Modified SqueezeNet Architecture for Parkinson's Disease Detection Based on Keypress Data.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is the most common form of Parkinsonism, which is a group of neurological disorders with PD-like motor impairments. The disease affects over 6 million people worldwide and is characterized by motor and non-motor symptoms. The affected person has trouble in controlling movements, which may affect simple daily-life tasks, such as typing on a computer. We propose the application of a modified SqueezeNet convolutional neural network (CNN) for detecting PD based on the subject's key-typing patterns. First, the data are pre-processed using data standardization and the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE), and then a Continuous Wavelet Transformation is applied to generate spectrograms used for training and testing a modified SqueezeNet model. The modified SqueezeNet model achieved an accuracy of 90%, representing a noticeable improvement in comparison to other approaches.

An Effective Fusing Approach by Combining Connectivity Network Pattern and Temporal-Spatial Analysis for EEG-Based BCI Rehabilitation.

Motor-modality-based brain computer interface (BCI) could promote the neural rehabilitation for stroke patients. Temporal-spatial analysis was commonly used for pattern recognition in this task. This paper introduced a novel connectivity network analysis for EEG-based feature selection. The network features of connectivity pattern not only captured the spatial activities responding to motor task, but also mined the interactive pattern among these cerebral regions. Furthermore, the effective combination between temporal-spatial analysis and network analysis was evaluated for improving the performance of BCI classification (81.7%). And the results demonstrated that it could raise the classification accuracies for most of patients (6 of 7 patients). This proposed method was meaningful for developing the effective BCI training program for stroke rehabilitation.

Multithreshold Segmentation and Machine Learning Based Approach to Differentiate COVID-19 from Viral Pneumonia.

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has created an unprecedented devastation and the loss of millions of lives globally. Contagious nature and fatalities invariably pose challenges to physicians and healthcare support systems. Clinical diagnostic evaluation using reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction and other approaches are currently in use. The Chest X-ray (CXR) and CT images were effectively utilized in screening purposes that could provide relevant data on localized regions affected by the infection. A step towards automated screening and diagnosis using CXR and CT could be of considerable importance in these turbulent times. The main objective is to probe a simple threshold-based segmentation approach to identify possible infection regions in CXR images and investigate intensity-based, wavelet transform (WT)-based, and Laws based texture features with statistical measures. Further feature selection strategy using Random Forest (RF) then selected features used to create Machine Learning (ML) representation with Support Vector Machine (SVM) and a Random Forest (RF) to make different COVID-19 from viral pneumonia (VP). The results obtained clearly indicate that the intensity and WT-based features vary in the two pathologies that are better differentiated with the combined features trained using SVM and RF classifiers. Classifier performance measures like an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.97 and by and large classification accuracy of 0.9 using the RF model clearly indicate that the methodology implemented is useful in characterizing COVID-19 and Viral Pneumonia.

Explainable artificial intelligence-based edge fuzzy images for COVID-19 detection and identification.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to wreak havoc on the world's population's health and well-being. Successful screening of infected patients is a critical step in the fight against it, with radiology examination using chest radiography being one of the most important screening methods. For the definitive diagnosis of COVID-19 disease, reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction remains the gold standard. Currently available lab tests may not be able to detect all infected individuals; new screening methods are required. We propose a Multi-Input Transfer Learning COVID-Net fuzzy convolutional neural network to detect COVID-19 instances from torso X-ray, motivated by the latter and the open-source efforts in this research area. Furthermore, we use an explainability method to investigate several Convolutional Networks COVID-Net forecasts in an effort to not only gain deeper insights into critical factors associated with COVID-19 instances, but also to aid clinicians in improving screening. We show that using transfer learning and pre-trained models, we can detect it with a high degree of accuracy. Using X-ray images, we chose four neural networks to predict its probability. Finally, in order to achieve better results, we considered various methods to verify the techniques proposed here. As a result, we were able to create a model with an AUC of 1.0 and accuracy, precision, and recall of 0.97. The model was quantized for use in Internet of Things devices and maintained a 0.95 percent accuracy.

Automated CCA-MWF Algorithm for Unsupervised Identification and Removal of EOG Artifacts From EEG.

Affective brain computer interface (ABCI) enables machines to perceive, understand, express and respond to people's emotions. Therefore, it is expected to play an important role in emotional care and mental disorder detection. EEG signals are most frequently adopted as the physiology measurement in ABCI applications. Eye blinking and movements introduce lots of artifacts into raw EEG data, which seriously affect the quality of EEG signal and the subsequent emotional EEG feature engineering and recognition. In this paper, we propose a fully automatic and unsupervised ocular artifact identification and removal algorithm named automated canonical correlation analysis (CCA)-multi-channel wiener filter (MWF) (ACCAMWF). Firstly, spatial distribution entropy (SDE) and spectral entropy (SE) are computed to automatically annotate artifact segments. Then, CCA algorithm is used to extract neural signal from artifact contaminated data to further supplement the clean EEG data. Finally, MWF is trained to remove ocular artifacts from multiple channel EEG data adaptively. Extensive experiments have been carried out on semi-simulated EEG/EOG dataset and real eye blinking-contaminated EEG dataset to verify the effectiveness of our method when compared to two state-of-the-art algorithms. The results clearly demonstrate that ACCAMWF is a promising solution for removing EOG artifacts from emotional EEG data.

Light-DehazeNet: A Novel Lightweight CNN Architecture for Single Image Dehazing.

Due to the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, industrial sectors are revolutionizing in automation, reliability, and robustness, thereby significantly increasing quality and productivity. Most of the surveillance and industrial sectors are monitored by visual sensor networks capturing different surrounding environment images. However, during tempestuous weather conditions, the visual quality of the images is reduced due to contaminated suspended atmospheric particles that affect the overall surveillance systems. To tackle these challenges, this article presents a computationally efficient lightweight convolutional neural network referred to as Light-DehazeNet (LD-Net) for the reconstruction of hazy images. Unlike other learning-based approaches, which separately measure the transmission map and the atmospheric light, our proposed LD-Net jointly estimates both the transmission map and the atmospheric light using a transformed atmospheric scattering model. Furthermore, a color visibility restoration method is proposed to evade the color distortion in the dehaze image. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments using synthetic and natural hazy images. The quantitative and qualitative evaluation on different benchmark hazy datasets verify the superiority of the proposed method over other state-of-the-art image dehazing techniques. Moreover, additional experimentation validates the applicability of the proposed method in the object detection tasks. Considering the lightweight architecture with minimal computational cost, the proposed system is encouraged to be incorporated as an integral part of the vision-based monitoring systems to improve the overall performance.

A new approach for the detection of pneumonia in children using CXR images based on an real-time IoT system.

Pneumonia is responsible for high infant morbidity and mortality. This disease affects the small air sacs (alveoli) in the lung and requires prompt diagnosis and appropriate treatment. Chest X-rays are one of the most common tests used to detect pneumonia. In this work, we propose a real-time Internet of Things (IoT) system to detect pneumonia in chest X-ray images. The dataset used has 6000 chest X-ray images of children, and three medical specialists performed the validations. In this work, twelve different architectures of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) trained on ImageNet were adapted to operate as the resource extractors. Subsequently, the CNNs were combined with consolidated learning methods, such as k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN), Naive Bayes, Random Forest, Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The results showed that the VGG19 architecture with the SVM classifier using the RBF kernel was the best model to detect pneumonia in these chest radiographs. This combination reached 96.47%, 96.46%, and 96.46% for Accuracy, F1 score, and Precision values, respectively. Compared to other works in the literature, the proposed approach had better results for the metrics used. These results show that this approach for the detection of pneumonia in children using a real-time IoT system is efficient and is, therefore, a potential tool to aid in medical diagnoses. This approach will allow specialists to obtain faster and more accurate results and thus provide the appropriate treatment.

Computer-assisted Parkinson's disease diagnosis using fuzzy optimum- path forest and Restricted Boltzmann Machines.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative illness associated with motor skill disorders, affecting thousands of people, mainly elderly, worldwide. Since its symptoms are not clear and commonly confused with other diseases, providing early diagnosis is a challenging task for traditional methods. In this context, computer-aided assistance is an alternative method for a fast and automatic diagnosis, accelerating the treatment and alleviating an excessive effort from professionals. Moreover, the most recent studies proposing a solution to this problem lack in computational efficiency, prediction power, reliability among other factors. Therefore, this work proposes a Fuzzy Optimum Path Forest for automated PD identification, which is based on fuzzy logic and graph-based framework theory. Experiments consider a dataset composed of features extracted from hand-drawn images using Restricted Boltzmann Machines, and results are compared with baseline models such as Support Vector Machines, KNN, and the standard OPF classifier. Results show that the proposed model outperforms the baselines in most cases, suggesting the Fuzzy OPF as a viable alternative to deal with PD detection problems.

Efficient Security and Authentication for Edge-Based Internet of Medical Things.

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)-driven smart health and emotional care is revolutionizing the healthcare industry by embracing several technologies related to multimodal physiological data collection, communication, intelligent automation, and efficient manufacturing. The authentication and secure exchange of electronic health records (EHRs), comprising of patient data collected using wearable sensors and laboratory investigations, is of paramount importance. In this article, we present a novel high payload and reversible EHR embedding framework to secure the patient information successfully and authenticate the received content. The proposed approach is based on novel left data mapping (LDM), pixel repetition method (PRM), RC4 encryption, and checksum computation. The input image of size [Formula: see text] is upscaled by using PRM that guarantees reversibility with lesser computational complexity. The binary secret data are encrypted using the RC4 encryption algorithm and then the encrypted data are grouped into 3-bit chunks and converted into decimal equivalents. Before embedding, these decimal digits are encoded by LDM. To embed the shifted data, the cover image is divided into [Formula: see text] blocks and then in each block, two digits are embedded into the counter diagonal pixels. For tamper detection and localization, a checksum digit computed from the block is embedded into one of the main diagonal pixels. A fragile logo is embedded into the cover images in addition to EHR to facilitate early tamper detection. The average peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) of the stego-images obtained is 41.95 dB for a very high embedding capacity of 2.25 bits per pixel. Furthermore, the embedding time is less than 0.2 s. Experimental results reveal that our approach outperforms many state-of-the-art techniques in terms of payload, imperceptibility, computational complexity, and capability to detect and localize tamper. All the attributes affirm that the proposed scheme is a potential candidate for providing better security and authentication solutions for IoMT-based smart health.

Smart Supervision of Cardiomyopathy Based on Fuzzy Harris Hawks Optimizer and Wearable Sensing Data Optimization: A New Model.

Cardiomyopathy is a disease category that describes the diseases of the heart muscle. It can infect all ages with different serious complications, such as heart failure and sudden cardiac arrest. Usually, signs and symptoms of cardiomyopathy include abnormal heart rhythms, dizziness, lightheadedness, and fainting. Smart devices have blown up a nonclinical revolution to heart patients' monitoring. In particular, motion sensors can concurrently monitor patients' abnormal movements. Smart wearables can efficiently track abnormal heart rhythms. These intelligent wearables emitted data must be adequately processed to make the right decisions for heart patients. In this article, a comprehensive, optimized model is introduced for smart monitoring of cardiomyopathy patients via sensors and wearable devices. The proposed model includes two new proposed algorithms. First, a fuzzy Harris hawks optimizer (FHHO) is introduced to increase the coverage of monitored patients by redistributing sensors in the observed area via the hybridization of artificial intelligence (AI) and fuzzy logic (FL). Second, we introduced wearable sensing data optimization (WSDO), which is a novel algorithm for the accurate and reliable handling of cardiomyopathy sensing data. After testing and verification, FHHO proves to enhance patient coverage and reduce the number of needed sensors. Meanwhile, WSDO is employed for the detection of heart rate and failure in large simulations. These experimental results indicate that WSDO can efficiently refine the sensing data with high accuracy rates and low time cost.

A Smart Waste Management Solution Geared towards Citizens.

Global industry is undergoing major transformations with the genesis of a new paradigm known as the Internet of Things (IoT) with its underlying technologies. Many company leaders are investing more effort and money in transforming their services to capitalize on the benefits provided by the IoT. Thereby, the decision makers in public waste management do not want to be outdone, and it is challenging to provide an efficient and real-time waste management system. This paper proposes a solution (hardware, software, and communications) that aims to optimize waste management and include a citizen in the process. The system follows an IoT-based approach where the discarded waste from the smart bin is continuously monitored by sensors that inform the filling level of each compartment, in real-time. These data are stored and processed in an IoT middleware providing information for collection with optimized routes and generating important statistical data for monitoring the waste collection accurately in terms of resource management and the provided services for the community. Citizens can easily access information about the public waste bins through the Web or a mobile application. The creation of the real prototype of the smart container, the development of the waste management application and a real-scale experiment use case for evaluation, demonstration, and validation show that the proposed system can efficiently change the way people deal with their garbage and optimize economic and material resources.

Fast fully automatic heart fat segmentation in computed tomography datasets.

Heart diseases affect a large part of the world's population. Studies have shown that these diseases are related to cardiac fat. Various medical diagnostic aid systems are developed to reduce these diseases. In this context, this paper presents a new approach to the segmentation of cardiac fat from Computed Tomography (CT) images. The study employs a clustering algorithm called Floor of Log (FoL). The advantage of this method is the significant drop in segmentation time. Support Vector Machine was used to learn the best FoL algorithm parameter as well as mathematical morphology techniques for noise removal. The time to segment cardiac fat on a CT is only 2.01 s on average. In contrast, literature works require more than one hour to perform segmentation. Therefore, this job is one of the fastest to segment an exam completely. The value of the Accuracy metric was 93.45% and Specificity of 95.52%. The proposed approach is automatic and requires less computational effort. With these results, the use of this approach for the segmentation of cardiac fat proves to be efficient, besides having good application times. Therefore, it has the potential to be a medical diagnostic aid tool. Consequently, it is possible to help experts achieve faster and more accurate results.

Automatic Neuroimage Processing and Analysis in Stroke-A Systematic Review.

This article presents a systematic review of the current computational technologies applied to medical images for the detection, segmentation, and classification of strokes. Besides, analyzing and evaluating the technological advances, the challenges to be overcome and the future trends are discussed. The principal approaches make use of artificial intelligence, digital image processing and analysis, and various other technologies to develop computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems to improve the accuracy in the diagnostic process, as well as the interpretation consistency of medical images. However, there are some points that require greater attention such as low sensitivity, optimization of the algorithm, a reduction of false positives, and improvement in the identification and segmentation processes of different sizes and shapes. Also, there is a need to improve the classification steps of different stroke types and subtypes. Furthermore, there is an additional need for further research to improve the current techniques and develop new algorithms to overcome disadvantages identified here. The main focus of this research is to analyze the applied technologies for the development of CAD systems and verify how effective they are for stroke detection, segmentation, and classification. The main contributions of this review are that it analyzes only up-to-date studies, mainly from 2015 to 2018, as well as organizing the various studies in the area according to the research proposal, i.e., detection, segmentation, and classification of the types of stroke and the respective techniques used. Thus, the review has great relevance for future research, since it presents an ample comparison of the most recent works in the area, clearly showing the existing difficulties and the models that have been proposed to overcome such difficulties.