Classification and retrieval on macroinvertebrate image databases.

Aquatic ecosystems are continuously threatened by a growing number of human induced changes. Macroinvertebrate biomonitoring is particularly efficient in pinpointing the cause-effect structure between slow and subtle changes and their detrimental consequences in aquatic ecosystems. The greatest obstacle to implementing efficient biomonitoring is currently the cost-intensive human expert taxonomic identification of samples. While there is evidence that automated recognition techniques can match human taxa identification accuracy at greatly reduced costs, so far the development of automated identification techniques for aquatic organisms has been minimal. In this paper, we focus on advancing classification and data retrieval that are instrumental when processing large macroinvertebrate image datasets. To accomplish this for routine biomonitoring, in this paper we shall investigate the feasibility of automated river macroinvertebrate classification and retrieval with high precision. Besides the state-of-the-art classifiers such as Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and Bayesian Classifiers (BCs), the focus is particularly drawn on feed-forward artificial neural networks (ANNs), namely multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) and radial basis function networks (RBFNs). Since both ANN types have been proclaimed superior by different investigations even for the same benchmark problems, we shall first show that the main reason for this ambiguity lies in the static and rather poor comparison methodologies applied in most earlier works. Especially the most common drawback occurs due to the limited evaluation of the ANN performances over just one or few network architecture(s). Therefore, in this study, an extensive evaluation of each classifier performance over an ANN architecture space is performed. The best classifier among all, which is trained over a dataset of river macroinvertebrate specimens, is then used in the MUVIS framework for the efficient search and retrieval of particular macroinvertebrate peculiars. Classification and retrieval results present high accuracy and can match an experts' ability for taxonomic identification.

Classification of holter registers by dynamic clustering using multi-dimensional particle swarm optimization.

In this paper, we address dynamic clustering in high dimensional data or feature spaces as an optimization problem where multi-dimensional particle swarm optimization (MD PSO) is used to find out the true number of clusters, while fractional global best formation (FGBF) is applied to avoid local optima. Based on these techniques we then present a novel and personalized long-term ECG classification system, which addresses the problem of labeling the beats within a long-term ECG signal, known as Holter register, recorded from an individual patient. Due to the massive amount of ECG beats in a Holter register, visual inspection is quite difficult and cumbersome, if not impossible. Therefore the proposed system helps professionals to quickly and accurately diagnose any latent heart disease by examining only the representative beats (the so called master key-beats) each of which is representing a cluster of homogeneous (similar) beats. We tested the system on a benchmark database where the beats of each Holter register have been manually labeled by cardiologists. The selection of the right master key-beats is the key factor for achieving a highly accurate classification and the proposed systematic approach produced results that were consistent with the manual labels with 99.5% average accuracy, which basically shows the efficiency of the system.

A personalized classification system for Holter registers.

In this paper we present a personalized long-term electrocardiogram (ECG) classification framework, which can be applied to any Holter register recorded from an individual patient. Due to the massive amount of ECG beats in a Holter register, visual inspection is quite difficult and cumbersome, if not impossible. Therefore the proposed system helps professionals to quickly and accurately diagnose any latent heart disease by examining only the representative beats (the so called master key-beats) each of which is automatically extracted from a time frame of homogeneous (similar) beats. We tested the system on a benchmark database where beats of each Holter register have been manually labeled by cardiologists. The selection of the right master key-beats is the key factor for achieving a highly accurate classification and thus we used exhaustive K-means clustering in order to find out (near-) optimal number of key-beats as well as the master key-beats. The classification process produced results that were consistent with the manual labels with over 99% average accuracy, which basically shows the efficiency and the robustness of the proposed system over massive data (feature) collections in high dimensions.