EEG dataset for energy data visualizations.

User behavior plays a substantial role in shaping household energy use. Nevertheless, the methodologies employed by researchers to examine user behavior exhibit certain limitations in terms of their reach. The present article introduces an openly accessible collection of electroencephalography (EEG) recordings, comprising EEG data collected from individuals who were subjected to energy data visualizations. The dataset comprises EEG recordings obtained from 28 individuals who were in good health. The EEG recordings were collected using a 32-channel EMOTIV EEG device, and the international 10-20 electrode system was employed for precise electrode placement. The energy data visualizations were generated and showcased utilizing the PsychoPy software. To ascertain the participants' affective state, they were requested to rate the valence and arousal of each stimulus through the utilization of a self-assessment manikin (SAM). Additionally, three inquiries were posed for every stimulation. The dataset includes both original data visualizations and ratings. Additionally, the raw EEG data has been divided into segments consisting of data visualizations and neutral images, with the use of event markers, in order to assist analysis. The EEG recordings were recorded and stored utilizing the EMOTIVPro application, whereas the subjective reactions were captured and preserved using the PsychoPy application. Furthermore, the generation of synthetic EEG data is accomplished by employing the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) architecture on the acquired EEG dataset. The synthetic EEG data created is integrated with empirical EEG data, and afterwards subjected to qualitative and quantitative analysis in order to improve performance. The dataset presented herein showcases a pioneering utilization of EEG investigation and offers a valuable foundation for scholars in the domains of computer science, energy conservation, artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, and human-computer interaction.

Novel domestic building energy consumption dataset: 1D timeseries and 2D Gramian Angular Fields representation.

This data article describes a dataset collected in 2022 in a domestic household in the UK. The data provides appliance-level power consumption data and ambient environmental conditions as a timeseries and as a collection of 2D images created using Gramian Angular Fields (GAF). The importance of the dataset lies in (a) providing the research community with a dataset that combines appliance-level data coupled with important contextual information for the surrounding environment; (b) presents energy data summaries as 2D images to help obtain novel insights using data visualization and Machine Learning (ML). The methodology involves installing smart plugs to a number of domestic appliances, environmental and occupancy sensors, and connecting the plugs and the sensors to a High-Performance Edge Computing (HPEC) system to privately store, pre-process, and post-process data. The heterogenous data include several parameters, including power consumption (W), voltage (V), current (A), ambient indoor temperature (°C), relative indoor humidity (RH%), and occupancy (binary). The dataset also includes outdoor weather conditions based on data from The Norwegian Meteorological Institute (MET Norway) including temperature (°C), outdoor humidity (RH%), barometric pressure (hPA), wind bearing (deg), and windspeed (m/s). This dataset is valuable for energy efficiency researchers, electrical engineers, and computer scientists to develop, validate, and deploy and computer vision and data-driven energy efficiency systems.

AI-big data analytics for building automation and management systems: a survey, actual challenges and future perspectives.

In theory, building automation and management systems (BAMSs) can provide all the components and functionalities required for analyzing and operating buildings. However, in reality, these systems can only ensure the control of heating ventilation and air conditioning system systems. Therefore, many other tasks are left to the operator, e.g. evaluating buildings' performance, detecting abnormal energy consumption, identifying the changes needed to improve efficiency, ensuring the security and privacy of end-users, etc. To that end, there has been a movement for developing artificial intelligence (AI) big data analytic tools as they offer various new and tailor-made solutions that are incredibly appropriate for practical buildings' management. Typically, they can help the operator in (i) analyzing the tons of connected equipment data; and; (ii) making intelligent, efficient, and on-time decisions to improve the buildings' performance. This paper presents a comprehensive systematic survey on using AI-big data analytics in BAMSs. It covers various AI-based tasks, e.g. load forecasting, water management, indoor environmental quality monitoring, occupancy detection, etc. The first part of this paper adopts a well-designed taxonomy to overview existing frameworks. A comprehensive review is conducted about different aspects, including the learning process, building environment, computing platforms, and application scenario. Moving on, a critical discussion is performed to identify current challenges. The second part aims at providing the reader with insights into the real-world application of AI-big data analytics. Thus, three case studies that demonstrate the use of AI-big data analytics in BAMSs are presented, focusing on energy anomaly detection in residential and office buildings and energy and performance optimization in sports facilities. Lastly, future directions and valuable recommendations are identified to improve the performance and reliability of BAMSs in intelligent buildings.

Lightweight Gramian Angular Field classification for edge internet of energy applications.

With adverse industrial effects on the global landscape, climate change is imploring the global economy to adopt sustainable solutions. The ongoing evolution of energy efficiency targets massive data collection and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for big data analytics. Besides, emerging on the Internet of Energy (IoE) paradigm, edge computing is playing a rising role in liberating private data from cloud centralization. In this direction, a creative visual approach to understanding energy data is introduced. Building upon micro-moments, which are timeseries of small contextual data points, the power of pictorial representations to encapsulate rich information in a small two-dimensional (2D) space is harnessed through a novel Gramian Angular Fields (GAF) classifier for energy micro-moments. Designed with edge computing efficiency in mind, current testing results on the ODROID-XU4 can classify up to 7 million GAF-converted datapoints with ~ 90% accuracy in less than 30 s, paving the path towards industrial adoption of edge IoE. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10586-022-03704-1.

Deep learning with multiresolution handcrafted features for brain MRI segmentation.

The segmentation of magnetic resonance (MR) images is a crucial task for creating pseudo computed tomography (CT) images which are used to achieve positron emission tomography (PET) attenuation correction. One of the main challenges of creating pseudo CT images is the difficulty to obtain an accurate segmentation of the bone tissue in brain MR images. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely and efficiently applied to perform MR image segmentation. The aim of this work is to propose a segmentation approach that combines multiresolution handcrafted features with CNN-based features to add directional properties and enrich the set of features to perform segmentation. The main objective is to efficiently segment the brain into three tissue classes: bone, soft tissue, and air. The proposed method combines non subsampled Contourlet (NSCT) and non subsampled Shearlet (NSST) coefficients with CNN's features using different mechanisms. The entropy value is calculated to select the most useful coefficients and reduce the input's dimensionality. The segmentation results are evaluated using fifty clinical brain MR and CT images by calculating the precision, recall, dice similarity coefficient (DSC), and Jaccard similarity coefficient (JSC). The results are also compared to other methods reported in the literature. The DSC of the bone class is improved from 0.6179 ± 0.0006 to 0.6416 ± 0.0006. The addition of multiresolution features of NSCT and NSST with CNN's features demonstrates promising results. Moreover, NSST coefficients provide more useful information than NSCT coefficients.

Incorporating patient concerns into design requirements for IoMT-based systems: The fall detection case study.

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) systems are envisioned to provide high-quality healthcare services to patients in the comfort of their home, utilizing cutting-edge Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and medical sensors. Patient comfort and willingness to participate in such efforts is a prominent factor for their adoption. As IoT technology has provided solutions for all technical issues, patient concerns are those that seem to restrict their wider adoption. To enhance patient awareness of the system properties and enhance their willingness to adopt IoMT solutions, this paper presents a novel methodology to integrate patient concerns in the design requirements of such systems. It comprises a number of straightforward steps that an IoMT designer can follow, starting from identifying patient concerns, incorporating them in system design requirements as criticalities, proceeding to system implementation and testing, and finally, verifying that it fulfills the concerns of the patients. To showcase the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, the paper applies it in the design and implementation of a fall detection system for elderly patients remotely monitored in their homes.

A novel gateway-based solution for remote elderly monitoring.

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have been applied to various fields such as manufacturing, automobile industry and healthcare. IoT-based healthcare has a significant impact on real-time remote monitoring of patients' health and consequently improving treatments and reducing healthcare costs. In fact, IoT has made healthcare more reliable, efficient, and accessible. Two major drawbacks which IoT suffers from can be expressed as: first, thelimited battery capacityof thesensorsis quickly depleted due to the continuous stream of data; second, the dependence of the system on the cloud for computations and processing causes latency in data transmission which is not accepted in real-time monitoring applications. This research is conducted to develop a real-time, secure, and energy-efficient platform which provides a solution for reducing computation load on the cloud and diminishing data transmission delay. In the proposed platform, the sensors utilize a state-of-the-art power saving technique known as Compressive Sensing (CS). CS allows sensors to retrieve the sensed data using fewer measurements by sending a compressed signal. In this framework, the signal reconstruction and processing are computed locally on a Heterogeneous Multicore Platform (HMP) device to decrease the dependency on the cloud. In addition, a framework has been implemented to control the system, set different parameters, display the data as well as send live notifications to medical experts through the cloud in order to alert them of any eventual hazardous event or abnormality and allow quick interventions. Finally, a case study of the system is presented demonstrating the acquisition and monitoring of the data for a given subject in real-time. The obtained results reveal that the proposed solution reduces 15.4% of energy consumption in sensors, that makes this prototype a good candidate for IoT employment in healthcare.

MR Image-Based Attenuation Correction of Brain PET Imaging: Review of Literature on Machine Learning Approaches for Segmentation.

Recent emerging hybrid technology of positron emission tomography/magnetic resonance (PET/MR) imaging has generated a great need for an accurate MR image-based PET attenuation correction. MR image segmentation, as a robust and simple method for PET attenuation correction, has been clinically adopted in commercial PET/MR scanners. The general approach in this method is to segment the MR image into different tissue types, each assigned an attenuation constant as in an X-ray CT image. Machine learning techniques such as clustering, classification and deep networks are extensively used for brain MR image segmentation. However, only limited work has been reported on using deep learning in brain PET attenuation correction. In addition, there is a lack of clinical evaluation of machine learning methods in this application. The aim of this review is to study the use of machine learning methods for MR image segmentation and its application in attenuation correction for PET brain imaging. Furthermore, challenges and future opportunities in MR image-based PET attenuation correction are discussed.

Lattice-Boltzmann interactive blood flow simulation pipeline.

PURPOSE: Cerebral aneurysms are one of the prevalent cerebrovascular disorders in adults worldwide and caused by a weakness in the brain artery. The most impressive treatment for a brain aneurysm is interventional radiology treatment, which is extremely dependent on the skill level of the radiologist. Hence, accurate detection and effective therapy for cerebral aneurysms still remain important clinical challenges. In this work, we have introduced a pipeline for cerebral blood flow simulation and real-time visualization incorporating all aspects from medical image acquisition to real-time visualization and steering. METHODS: We have developed and employed an improved version of HemeLB as the main computational core of the pipeline. HemeLB is a massive parallel lattice-Boltzmann fluid solver optimized for sparse and complex geometries. The visualization component of this pipeline is based on the ray marching method implemented on CUDA capable GPU cores. RESULTS: The proposed visualization engine is evaluated comprehensively and the reported results demonstrate that it achieves significantly higher scalability and sites updates per second, indicating higher update rate of geometry sites' values, in comparison with the original HemeLB. This proposed engine is more than two times faster and capable of 3D visualization of the results by processing more than 30 frames per second. CONCLUSION: A reliable modeling and visualizing environment for measuring and displaying blood flow patterns in vivo, which can provide insight into the hemodynamic characteristics of cerebral aneurysms, is presented in this work. This pipeline increases the speed of visualization and maximizes the performance of the processing units to do the tasks by breaking them into smaller tasks and working with GPU to render the images. Hence, the proposed pipeline can be applied as part of clinical routines to provide the clinicians with the real-time cerebral blood flow-related information.

A skills acquisition study on ECMOjo: a screen-based simulator for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation.

BACKGROUND: Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation relies heavily on didactic teaching, emphasizing on essential cognitive skills, but overlooking core behavioral skills such as leadership and communication. Therefore, simulation-based training has been adopted to instill clinical knowledge through immersive experiences. Despite simulation-based training's effectiveness, training opportunities are lessened due to high costs. This is where screen-based simulators come into the scene as affordable and realistic alternatives. AIM: This article evaluates the educational efficacy of ECMOjo, an open-source screen-based extracorporeal membrane oxygenation simulator that aims to replace extracorporeal membrane oxygenation didactic instruction in an interactive and cost-effective manner. METHOD: A prospective cohort skills acquisition study was carried out. A total of 44 participants were pre-assessed, divided into two groups, where the first group received traditional didactic teaching, and the second used ECMOjo. Participants were then evaluated through a wet lab assessment and two questionnaires. RESULTS: The obtained results indicate that the two assessed groups show no statistically significant differences in knowledge and efficacy. Hence, ECMOjo is considered an alternative to didactic teaching as per the learning outcomes. CONCLUSION: The present findings show no significant dissimilarities between ECMOjo and didactic classroom-based teaching. Both methods are very comparable in terms of the learner's reported self-efficacy and complementary to mannequin-based simulations.

Moving object tracking in clinical scenarios: application to cardiac surgery and cerebral aneurysm clipping.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Surgical procedures such as laparoscopic and robotic surgeries are popular since they are invasive in nature and use miniaturized surgical instruments for small incisions. Tracking of the instruments (graspers, needle drivers) and field of view from the stereoscopic camera during surgery could further help the surgeons to remain focussed and reduce the probability of committing any mistakes. Tracking is usually preferred in computerized video surveillance, traffic monitoring, military surveillance system, and vehicle navigation. Despite the numerous efforts over the last few years, object tracking still remains an open research problem, mainly due to motion blur, image noise, lack of image texture, and occlusion. Most of the existing object tracking methods are time-consuming and less accurate when the input video contains high volume of information and more number of instruments. METHODS: This paper presents a variational framework to track the motion of moving objects in surgery videos. The key contributions are as follows: (1) A denoising method using stochastic resonance in maximal overlap discrete wavelet transform is proposed and (2) a robust energy functional based on Bhattacharyya coefficient to match the target region in the first frame of the input sequence with the subsequent frames using a similarity metric is developed. A modified affine transformation-based registration is used to estimate the motion of the features following an active contour-based segmentation method to converge the contour resulted from the registration process. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: The proposed method has been implemented on publicly available databases; the results are found satisfactory. Overlap index (OI) is used to evaluate the tracking performance, and the maximum OI is found to be 76% and 88% on private data and public data sequences.

Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation simulation-based training: methods, drawbacks and a novel solution.

INTRODUCTION: Patients under the error-prone and complication-burdened extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) are looked after by a highly trained, multidisciplinary team. Simulation-based training (SBT) affords ECMO centers the opportunity to equip practitioners with the technical dexterity required to manage emergencies. The aim of this article is to review ECMO SBT activities and technology followed by a novel solution to current challenges. ECMO SIMULATION: The commonly-used simulation approach is easy-to-build as it requires a functioning ECMO machine and an altered circuit. Complications are simulated through manual circuit manipulations. However, scenario diversity is limited and often lacks physiological and/or mechanical authenticity. It is also expensive to continuously operate due to the consumption of highly specialized equipment. TECHNOLOGICAL AID: Commercial extensions can be added to enable remote control and to automate circuit manipulation, but do not improve on the realism or cost-effectiveness. A MODULAR ECMO SIMULATOR: To address those drawbacks, we are developing a standalone modular ECMO simulator that employs affordable technology for high-fidelity simulation.

Using thermochromism to simulate blood oxygenation in extracorporeal membrane oxygenation.

INTRODUCTION: Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) training programs employ real ECMO components, causing them to be extremely expensive while offering little realism in terms of blood oxygenation and pressure. To overcome those limitations, we are developing a standalone modular ECMO simulator that reproduces ECMO's visual, audio and haptic cues using affordable mechanisms. We present a central component of this simulator, capable of visually reproducing blood oxygenation color change using thermochromism. METHODS: Our simulated ECMO circuit consists of two physically distant modules, responsible for adding and withdrawing heat from a thermochromic fluid. This manipulation of heat creates a temperature difference between the fluid in the drainage line and the fluid in the return line of the circuit and, hence, a color difference. RESULTS: Thermochromic ink mixed with concentrated dyes was used to create a recipe for a realistic and affordable blood-colored fluid. The implemented "ECMO circuit" reproduced blood's oxygenation and deoxygenation color difference or lack thereof. The heat control circuit costs 300 USD to build and the thermochromic fluid costs 40 USD/L. During a ten-hour in situ demonstration, nineteen ECMO specialists rated the fidelity of the oxygenated and deoxygenated "blood" and the color contrast between them as highly realistic. CONCLUSIONS: Using low-cost yet high-fidelity simulation mechanisms, we implemented the central subsystem of our modular ECMO simulator, which creates the look and feel of an ECMO circuit without using an actual one.

Addressing the challenges of ECMO simulation.

INTRODUCTION/AIM: The patient's condition and high-risk nature of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) therapy force clinical services to ensure clinicians are properly trained and always ready to deal effectively with critical situations. Simulation-based education (SBE), from the simplest approaches to the most immersive modalities, helps promote optimum individual and team performance. The risks of SBE are negative learning, inauthenticity in learning and over-reliance on the participants' suspension of disbelief. This is especially relevant to ECMO SBE as circuit/patient interactions are difficult to fully simulate without confusing circuit alterations. METHODS: Our efforts concentrate on making ECMO simulation easier and more realistic in order to reduce the current gap there is between SBE and real ECMO patient care. Issues to be overcome include controlling the circuit pressures, system failures, patient issues, blood colour and cost factors. Key to our developments are the hospital-university collaboration and research funding. RESULTS: A prototype ECMO simulator has been developed that allows for realistic ECMO SBE. The system emulates the ECMO machine interface with remotely controllable pressure parameters, haemorrhaging, line chattering, air bubble noise and simulated blood colour change. CONCLUSION: The prototype simulator allows the simulation of common ECMO emergencies through innovative solutions that enhance the fidelity of ECMO SBE and reduce the requirement for suspension of disbelief from participants. Future developments will encompass the patient cannulation aspect.

Two-step single slope/SAR ADC with error correction for CMOS image sensor.

Conventional two-step ADC for CMOS image sensor requires full resolution noise performance in the first stage single slope ADC, leading to high power consumption and large chip area. This paper presents an 11-bit two-step single slope/successive approximation register (SAR) ADC scheme for CMOS image sensor applications. The first stage single slope ADC generates a 3-bit data and 1 redundant bit. The redundant bit is combined with the following 8-bit SAR ADC output code using a proposed error correction algorithm. Instead of requiring full resolution noise performance, the first stage single slope circuit of the proposed ADC can tolerate up to 3.125% quantization noise. With the proposed error correction mechanism, the power consumption and chip area of the single slope ADC are significantly reduced. The prototype ADC is fabricated using 0.18 µ m CMOS technology. The chip area of the proposed ADC is 7 µ m × 500 µ m. The measurement results show that the energy efficiency figure-of-merit (FOM) of the proposed ADC core is only 125 pJ/sample under 1.4 V power supply and the chip area efficiency is 84 k µ m(2) · cycles/sample.

A stochastic modelling framework for the reconstruction of cardiovascular signals.

This paper presents a common stochastic modelling framework for physiological signals which allows patient simulation following a synthesis-by-analysis approach. Within this framework, we propose a general model-based methodology able to reconstruct missing or artifacted signal intervals in cardiovascular monitoring applications. The proposed model consists of independent stages which provide high flexibility to incorporate signals of different nature in terms of shape, cross-correlation and variability. The reconstruction methodology is based on model sampling and selection based on a wide range of boundary conditions, which include prior information. Results on real data show how the proposed methodology fits the particular approaches presented so far for electrocardiogram (ECG) reconstruction and how a simple extension within the framework can significantly improve their performance.

Artificial Neural Network-Based System for PET Volume Segmentation.

Tumour detection, classification, and quantification in positron emission tomography (PET) imaging at early stage of disease are important issues for clinical diagnosis, assessment of response to treatment, and radiotherapy planning. Many techniques have been proposed for segmenting medical imaging data; however, some of the approaches have poor performance, large inaccuracy, and require substantial computation time for analysing large medical volumes. Artificial intelligence (AI) approaches can provide improved accuracy and save decent amount of time. Artificial neural networks (ANNs), as one of the best AI techniques, have the capability to classify and quantify precisely lesions and model the clinical evaluation for a specific problem. This paper presents a novel application of ANNs in the wavelet domain for PET volume segmentation. ANN performance evaluation using different training algorithms in both spatial and wavelet domains with a different number of neurons in the hidden layer is also presented. The best number of neurons in the hidden layer is determined according to the experimental results, which is also stated Levenberg-Marquardt backpropagation training algorithm as the best training approach for the proposed application. The proposed intelligent system results are compared with those obtained using conventional techniques including thresholding and clustering based approaches. Experimental and Monte Carlo simulated PET phantom data sets and clinical PET volumes of nonsmall cell lung cancer patients were utilised to validate the proposed algorithm which has demonstrated promising results.

Fully automated segmentation of oncological PET volumes using a combined multiscale and statistical model.

The widespread application of positron emission tomography (PET) in clinical oncology has driven this imaging technology into a number of new research and clinical arenas. Increasing numbers of patient scans have led to an urgent need for efficient data handling and the development of new image analysis techniques to aid clinicians in the diagnosis of disease and planning of treatment. Automatic quantitative assessment of metabolic PET data is attractive and will certainly revolutionize the practice of functional imaging since it can lower variability across institutions and may enhance the consistency of image interpretation independent of reader experience. In this paper, a novel automated system for the segmentation of oncological PET data aiming at providing an accurate quantitative analysis tool is proposed. The initial step involves expectation maximization (EM)-based mixture modeling using a k-means clustering procedure, which varies voxel order for initialization. A multiscale Markov model is then used to refine this segmentation by modeling spatial correlations between neighboring image voxels. An experimental study using an anthropomorphic thorax phantom was conducted for quantitative evaluation of the performance of the proposed segmentation algorithm. The comparison of actual tumor volumes to the volumes calculated using different segmentation methodologies including standard k-means, spatial domain Markov Random Field Model (MRFM), and the new multiscale MRFM proposed in this paper showed that the latter dramatically reduces the relative error to less than 8% for small lesions (7 mm radii) and less than 3.5% for larger lesions (9 mm radii). The analysis of the resulting segmentations of clinical oncologic PET data seems to confirm that this methodology shows promise and can successfully segment patient lesions. For problematic images, this technique enables the identification of tumors situated very close to nearby high normal physiologic uptake. The use of this technique to estimate tumor volumes for assessment of response to therapy and to delineate treatment volumes for the purpose of combined PET/CT-based radiation therapy treatment planning is also discussed.