Detecting emotions through EEG signals based on modified convolutional fuzzy neural network.

Emotion is a human sense that can influence an individual's life quality in both positive and negative ways. The ability to distinguish different types of emotion can lead researchers to estimate the current situation of patients or the probability of future disease. Recognizing emotions from images have problems concealing their feeling by modifying their facial expressions. This led researchers to consider Electroencephalography (EEG) signals for more accurate emotion detection. However, the complexity of EEG recordings and data analysis using conventional machine learning algorithms caused inconsistent emotion recognition. Therefore, utilizing hybrid deep learning models and other techniques has become common due to their ability to analyze complicated data and achieve higher performance by integrating diverse features of the models. However, researchers prioritize models with fewer parameters to achieve the highest average accuracy. This study improves the Convolutional Fuzzy Neural Network (CFNN) for emotion recognition using EEG signals to achieve a reliable detection system. Initially, the pre-processing and feature extraction phases are implemented to obtain noiseless and informative data. Then, the CFNN with modified architecture is trained to classify emotions. Several parametric and comparative experiments are performed. The proposed model achieved reliable performance for emotion recognition with an average accuracy of 98.21% and 98.08% for valence (pleasantness) and arousal (intensity), respectively, and outperformed state-of-the-art methods.

Focality in childhood absence epilepsy.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Childhood absence epilepsy (CAE) has a typical electroencephalography (EEG) pattern of generalized 3 Hz spike and wave discharges (SWD). Focal interictal discharges were also documented in a small number of documents. The aim was to investigate the amplitudes of interictal 3 Hz SWD within the 1st second in drug-naïve CAE patients. In this way, areas with maximal electronegativity at the beginning of clinically generalized discharges will be documented. METHODS: The EEG records of children with drug-naïve CAE were evaluated retrospectively by two child neurologists first for 3 Hz SWD. Then, a machine-learning model evaluated the amplitudes of 3 Hz in the 1st second of SWD. Maximum electronegativity areas were documented and classified as focal, bilateral, and generalized. RESULTS: One hundred and twelve 3 Hz SWD were evaluated in 11 patients. Among discharges within the 1st second, maximum electronegativity areas were documented as focal for 44 (39.2%), bilateral for 8 (7.1%), generalized for 60 (53.5%). Among focal electronegativity areas, mostly right central, left occipital and midline parietal areas were documented in 12 (10.7%), 7 (6.2%), and 6 (5.3%), respectively. Eight (7.1%) of the maximum electronegativity areas were detected bilaterally, of which 7 (6.2%) originated from the frontopolar areas. CONCLUSIONS: Focal maximal electronegativity areas were frequently observed in drug-naïve CAE patients, comprising approximately half of non-generalized discharges. Focal discharges might be misleading in diagnosis. Focal areas within the brain may be responsible for and contribute to absence seizures that appear bilaterally symmetrical and generalized clinically. Although its clinical implication is unknown, this warrants further study.

Prediction of osteoporosis using MRI and CT scans with unimodal and multimodal deep-learning models.

PURPOSE: Osteoporosis is the systematic degeneration of the human skeleton, with consequences ranging from a reduced quality of life to mortality. Therefore, the prediction of osteoporosis reduces risks and supports patients in taking precautions. Deep-learning and specific models achieve highly accurate results using different imaging modalities. The primary purpose of this research was to develop unimodal and multimodal deep-learning-based diagnostic models to predict bone mineral loss of the lumbar vertebrae using magnetic resonance (MR) and computed tomography (CT) imaging. METHODS: Patients who received both lumbar dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) and MRI (n = 120) or CT (n = 100) examinations were included in this study. Unimodal and multimodal convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with dual blocks were proposed to predict osteoporosis using lumbar vertebrae MR and CT examinations in separate and combined datasets. Bone mineral density values obtained by DEXA were used as reference data. The proposed models were compared with a CNN model and six benchmark pre-trained deep-learning models. RESULTS: The proposed unimodal model obtained 96.54%, 98.84%, and 96.76% balanced accuracy for MRI, CT, and combined datasets, respectively, while the multimodal model achieved 98.90% balanced accuracy in 5-fold cross-validation experiments. Furthermore, the models obtained 95.68%-97.91% accuracy with a hold-out validation dataset. In addition, comparative experiments demonstrated that the proposed models yielded superior results by providing more effective feature extraction in dual blocks to predict osteoporosis. CONCLUSION: This study demonstrated that osteoporosis was accurately predicted by the proposed models using both MR and CT images, and a multimodal approach improved the prediction of osteoporosis. With further research involving prospective studies with a larger number of patients, there may be an opportunity to implement these technologies into clinical practice.

COVID-19 Lung CT image segmentation using localization and enhancement methods with U-Net.

Segmentation of pneumonia lesions from Lung CT images has become vital for diagnosing the disease and evaluating the severity of the patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. Several AI-based systems have been proposed for this task. However, some low-contrast abnormal zones in CT images make the task challenging. The researchers investigated image preprocessing techniques to accomplish this problem and to enable more accurate segmentation by the AI-based systems. This study proposes a COVID-19 Lung-CT segmentation system based on histogram-based non-parametric region localization and enhancement (LE) methods prior to the U-Net architecture. The COVID-19-infected lung CT images were initially processed by the LE method, and the infected regions were detected and enhanced to provide more discriminative features to the deep learning segmentation methods. The U-Net is trained using the enhanced images to segment the regions affected by COVID-19. The proposed system achieved 97.75%, 0.85, and 0.74 accuracy, dice score, and Jaccard index, respectively. The comparison results suggested that the use of LE methods as a preprocessing step in CT Lung images significantly improved the feature extraction and segmentation abilities of the U-Net model by a 0.21 dice score. The results might lead to implementing the LE method in segmenting varied medical images.

A Near-Global Slowing of Background Activity and Epileptic Discharges in Children With Mild to Moderately Symptomatic COVID-19 Infection: An Electro-Neurophysiological Study.

Background. To assess the functional involvement of the central nervous system (CNS) via quantitative electroencephalography (EEG) analysis in children with mild to moderate COVID-19 infection who were otherwise previously healthy children. Methods. This prospective, case-control study was conducted between June and September 2020. Sleep EEG records of at least 40 min were planned for children who tested positive for COVID-19 using real-time PCR analysis and within 4-6 months post-recovery. All of the EEG analyses in this study were performed on an Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS Operating System with the developed software using Python 3.7.6. The quantitative analysis of the epileptic discharges within the EEG records was performed using random forest after elimination of the artifacts with a model training accuracy of 98% for each sample data point. The frequency analysis was performed using the Welch method. Results. Among the age and sex-matched groups, the global mean frequency was significantly lower among the COVID-19 patients, with a P-value of 0.004. The spike slow-wave and sharp slow-wave indices were significantly higher in the patients when compared to the controls. The mean frequency values were significantly lower in almost all of the electrodes recording the frontal, central, and occipital areas. For the temporal and parietal areas, those significantly low mean frequencies were limited to the right hemisphere. Conclusion. A near-global involvement of background activity with decreased frequency, in addition to epileptic discharges, was recorded in mild to moderately COVID-19 infected children post-infection.

Brain tumor segmentation in MRI images using nonparametric localization and enhancement methods with U-net.

PURPOSE: Segmentation is one of the critical steps in analyzing medical images since it provides meaningful information for the diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment of brain tumors. In recent years, several artificial intelligence-based systems have been developed to perform this task accurately. However, the unobtrusive or low-contrast occurrence of some tumors and similarities to healthy brain tissues make the segmentation task challenging. These yielded researchers to develop new methods for preprocessing the images and improving their segmentation abilities. METHODS: This study proposes an efficient system for the segmentation of the complete brain tumors from MRI images based on tumor localization and enhancement methods with a deep learning architecture named U-net. Initially, the histogram-based nonparametric tumor localization method is applied to localize the tumorous regions and the proposed tumor enhancement method is used to modify the localized regions to increase the visual appearance of indistinct or low-contrast tumors. The resultant images are fed to the original U-net architecture to segment the complete brain tumors. RESULTS: The performance of the proposed tumor localization and enhancement methods with the U-net is tested on benchmark datasets, BRATS 2012, BRATS 2019, and BRATS 2020, and achieved superior results as 0.94, 0.85, 0.87, 0.88 dice scores for the BRATS 2012 HGG-LGG, BRATS 2019, and BRATS 2020 datasets, respectively. CONCLUSION: The results and comparisons showed how the proposed methods improve the segmentation ability of the deep learning models and provide high-accuracy and low-cost segmentation of complete brain tumors in MRI images. The results might yield the implementation of the proposed methods in segmentation tasks of different medical fields.

Prediction of cancer incidence rates for the European continent using machine learning models.

Cancer is one of the most important and common public health problems on Earth that can occur in many different types. Treatments and precautions are aimed at minimizing the deaths caused by cancer; however, incidence rates continue to rise. Thus, it is important to analyze and estimate incidence rates to support the determination of more effective precautions. In this research, 2018 Cancer Datasheet of World Health Organization (WHO), is used and all countries on the European Continent are considered to analyze and predict the incidence rates until 2020, for Lung cancer, Breast cancer, Colorectal cancer, Prostate cancer and All types of cancer, which have highest incidence and mortality rates. Each cancer type is trained by six machine learning models namely, Linear Regression, Support Vector Regression, Decision Tree, Long-Short Term Memory neural network, Backpropagation neural network, and Radial Basis Function neural network according to gender types separately. Linear regression and support vector regression outperformed the other models with the R2 scores 0.99 and 0.98, respectively, in initial experiments, and then used for prediction of incidence rates of the considered cancer types. The ML models estimated that the maximum rise of incidence rates would be in colorectal cancer for females by 6%.

Review on Diagnosis of COVID-19 from Chest CT Images Using Artificial Intelligence.

The COVID-19 diagnostic approach is mainly divided into two broad categories, a laboratory-based and chest radiography approach. The last few months have witnessed a rapid increase in the number of studies use artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to diagnose COVID-19 with chest computed tomography (CT). In this study, we review the diagnosis of COVID-19 by using chest CT toward AI. We searched ArXiv, MedRxiv, and Google Scholar using the terms "deep learning", "neural networks", "COVID-19", and "chest CT". At the time of writing (August 24, 2020), there have been nearly 100 studies and 30 studies among them were selected for this review. We categorized the studies based on the classification tasks: COVID-19/normal, COVID-19/non-COVID-19, COVID-19/non-COVID-19 pneumonia, and severity. The sensitivity, specificity, precision, accuracy, area under the curve, and F1 score results were reported as high as 100%, 100%, 99.62, 99.87%, 100%, and 99.5%, respectively. However, the presented results should be carefully compared due to the different degrees of difficulty of different classification tasks.

Detection of COVID-19 from Chest X-Ray Images Using Convolutional Neural Networks.

The detection of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS CoV-2), which is responsible for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), using chest X-ray images has life-saving importance for both patients and doctors. In addition, in countries that are unable to purchase laboratory kits for testing, this becomes even more vital. In this study, we aimed to present the use of deep learning for the high-accuracy detection of COVID-19 using chest X-ray images. Publicly available X-ray images (1583 healthy, 4292 pneumonia, and 225 confirmed COVID-19) were used in the experiments, which involved the training of deep learning and machine learning classifiers. Thirty-eight experiments were performed using convolutional neural networks, 10 experiments were performed using five machine learning models, and 14 experiments were performed using the state-of-the-art pre-trained networks for transfer learning. Images and statistical data were considered separately in the experiments to evaluate the performances of models, and eightfold cross-validation was used. A mean sensitivity of 93.84%, mean specificity of 99.18%, mean accuracy of 98.50%, and mean receiver operating characteristics-area under the curve scores of 96.51% are achieved. A convolutional neural network without pre-processing and with minimized layers is capable of detecting COVID-19 in a limited number of, and in imbalanced, chest X-ray images.

High-accuracy Automated Diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease.

PURPOSE: Parkinson's disease (PD), which is the second most common neurodegenerative disease following Alzheimer's disease, can be diagnosed clinically when about 70% of the dopaminergic neurons are lost and symptoms are noticed. Neuroimaging methods such as single photon emission computed tomography have become useful tools in vivo to assess dopamine transporters (DATs) in the striatal region. However, inter- and intra-reader variability of construing the images might result in misdiagnosis. To overcome the challenges posed by classification of the disease, image preparation techniques and a back propagation neural network (BPNN) have been proposed. The aim of this study is to show that the proposed method can be used for the classification of PD with high accuracy. METHODS: In this study, we used basic image preparation techniques and a BPNN on DAT imaging datasets from the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative. 1,334 PD and 212 normal control (NC) subjects were included. In the image preparation phase, adaptive histogram equalization was applied to the cropped images, followed by image binarization. Then, the mass-difference method was applied to separate the regions of interest with similar values. Finally, the binarized images were subtracted from the original images, and the average pixel per node approach was applied to the images to minimize the inputs. In the BPNN phase, 400 input neurons and 2 output neurons were used. The dataset was divided into three sets: training, validation, and test. The BPNN was trained several times in order to obtain the optimum values. RESULTS: The use of 40 hidden neurons, a learning rate of 0.00079, and a momentum factor of 0.90 produced superior results and were applied in the final BPNN architecture. The tolerance value used was 0.80. Uniquely, we found the sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy for PD vs. NC classification to be 99.7%, 99.2%, 99.6%, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest accuracy value achieved in the existing literature. Our method increases computational speed together with improved performance. CONCLUSION: We have shown that effective image processing methods and the use of BPNN can successfully be applied to PD datasets to accurately determine any abnormalities in DATs. Using the shallow neural network, this procedure requires less processing time compared to other methods, and its accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity are reliable. However, further studies are needed to establish a prediction method for the preclinical and prodromal stages of the disease.

The use of back propagation neural networks and 18F-Florbetapir PET for early detection of Alzheimer's disease using Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative database.

Amyloid beta (Aß) plaques aggregation is considered as the "start" of the degenerative process that manifests years before the clinical symptoms appear in Alzheimer's Disease (AD). The aim of this study is to use back propagation neural networks (BPNNs) in 18F-florbetapir PET data for automated classification of four patient groups including AD, late mild cognitive impairment (LMCI), early mild cognitive impairment (EMCI), and significant memory concern (SMC), versus normal control (NC) for early AD detection. Five hundred images for AD, LMCI, EMCI, SMC, and NC, i.e., 100 images for each group, were used from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database. The results showed that the automated classification of NC/AD produced a high accuracy of 87.9%, while the results for the prodromal stages of the disease were 66.4%, 60.0%, and 52.9% for NC/LCMI, NC/EMCI and NC/SMC, respectively. The proposed method together with the image preparation steps can be used for early AD detection and classification with high accuracy using Aß PET dataset.

Document image binarisation using a supervised neural network.

Advances in digital technologies have allowed us to generate more images than ever. Images of scanned documents are examples of these images that form a vital part in digital libraries and archives. Scanned degraded documents contain background noise and varying contrast and illumination, therefore, document image binarisation must be performed in order to separate foreground from background layers. Image binarisation is performed using either local adaptive thresholding or global thresholding; with local thresholding being generally considered as more successful. This paper presents a novel method to global thresholding, where a neural network is trained using local threshold values of an image in order to determine an optimum global threshold value which is used to binarise the whole image. The proposed method is compared with five local thresholding methods, and the experimental results indicate that our method is computationally cost-effective and capable of binarising scanned degraded documents with superior results.