ECG Monitoring Systems: Review, Architecture, Processes, and Key Challenges.

Health monitoring and its related technologies is an attractive research area. The electrocardiogram (ECG) has always been a popular measurement scheme to assess and diagnose cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). The number of ECG monitoring systems in the literature is expanding exponentially. Hence, it is very hard for researchers and healthcare experts to choose, compare, and evaluate systems that serve their needs and fulfill the monitoring requirements. This accentuates the need for a verified reference guiding the design, classification, and analysis of ECG monitoring systems, serving both researchers and professionals in the field. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive, expert-verified taxonomy of ECG monitoring systems and conduct an extensive, systematic review of the literature. This provides evidence-based support for critically understanding ECG monitoring systems' components, contexts, features, and challenges. Hence, a generic architectural model for ECG monitoring systems is proposed, an extensive analysis of ECG monitoring systems' value chain is conducted, and a thorough review of the relevant literature, classified against the experts' taxonomy, is presented, highlighting challenges and current trends. Finally, we identify key challenges and emphasize the importance of smart monitoring systems that leverage new technologies, including deep learning, artificial intelligence (AI), Big Data and Internet of Things (IoT), to provide efficient, cost-aware, and fully connected monitoring systems.

A Novel Patient Similarity Network (PSN) Framework Based on Multi-Model Deep Learning for Precision Medicine.

Precision medicine can be defined as the comparison of a new patient with existing patients that have similar characteristics and can be referred to as patient similarity. Several deep learning models have been used to build and apply patient similarity networks (PSNs). However, the challenges related to data heterogeneity and dimensionality make it difficult to use a single model to reduce data dimensionality and capture the features of diverse data types. In this paper, we propose a multi-model PSN that considers heterogeneous static and dynamic data. The combination of deep learning models and PSN allows ample clinical evidence and information extraction against which similar patients can be compared. We use the bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) to analyze the contextual data and generate word embedding, where semantic features are captured using a convolutional neural network (CNN). Dynamic data are analyzed using a long-short-term-memory (LSTM)-based autoencoder, which reduces data dimensionality and preserves the temporal features of the data. We propose a data fusion approach combining temporal and clinical narrative data to estimate patient similarity. The experiments we conducted proved that our model provides a higher classification accuracy in determining various patient health outcomes when compared with other traditional classification algorithms.