Left ventricular hypertrophy detection using electrocardiographic signal.

Left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) indicates subclinical organ damage, associating with the incidence of cardiovascular diseases. From the medical perspective, electrocardiogram (ECG) is a low-cost, non-invasive, and easily reproducible tool that is often used as a preliminary diagnosis for the detection of heart disease. Nowadays, there are many criteria for assessing LVH by ECG. These criteria usually include that voltage combination of RS peaks in multi-lead ECG must be greater than one or more thresholds for diagnosis. We developed a system for detecting LVH using ECG signals by two steps: firstly, the R-peak and S-valley amplitudes of the 12-lead ECG were extracted to automatically obtain a total of 24 features and ECG beats of each case (LVH or non-LVH) were segmented; secondly, a back propagation neural network (BPN) was trained using a dataset with these features. Echocardiography (ECHO) was used as the gold standard for diagnosing LVH. The number of LVH cases (of a Taiwanese population) identified was 173. As each ECG sequence generally included 8 to 13 cycles (heartbeats) due to differences in heart rate, etc., we identified 1466 ECG cycles of LVH patients after beat segmentation. Results showed that our BPN model for detecting LVH reached the testing accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and specificity of 0.961, 0.958, 0.966 and 0.956, respectively. Detection performances of our BPN model, on the whole, outperform 7 methods using ECG criteria and many ECG-based artificial intelligence (AI) models reported previously for detecting LVH.

Intelligent image analysis recognizes important orchid viral diseases.

Phalaenopsis orchids are one of the most important exporting commodities for Taiwan. Most orchids are planted and grown in greenhouses. Early detection of orchid diseases is crucially valuable to orchid farmers during orchid cultivation. At present, orchid viral diseases are generally identified with manual observation and the judgment of the grower's experience. The most commonly used assays for virus identification are nucleic acid amplification and serology. However, it is neither time nor cost efficient. Therefore, this study aimed to create a system for automatically identifying the common viral diseases in orchids using the orchid image. Our methods include the following steps: the image preprocessing by color space transformation and gamma correction, detection of leaves by a U-net model, removal of non-leaf fragment areas by connected component labeling, feature acquisition of leaf texture, and disease identification by the two-stage model with the integration of a random forest model and an inception network (deep learning) model. Thereby, the proposed system achieved the excellent accuracy of 0.9707 and 0.9180 for the image segmentation of orchid leaves and disease identification, respectively. Furthermore, this system outperformed the naked-eye identification for the easily misidentified categories [cymbidium mosaic virus (CymMV) and odontoglossum ringspot virus (ORSV)] with the accuracy of 0.842 using two-stage model and 0.667 by naked-eye identification. This system would benefit the orchid disease recognition for Phalaenopsis cultivation.