IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics

With a massive influx of multimodality data, the role of data analytics in health informatics has grown rapidly in the last decade. This has also prompted increasing interests in the generation of analytical, data driven models based on machine learning in health informatics. Deep learning, a technique with its foundation in artificial neural networks, is emerging in recent years as a powerful too... View full abstract»

This paper provides an overview of recent developments in big data in the context of biomedical and health informatics. It outlines the key characteristics of big data and how medical and health informatics, translational bioinformatics, sensor informatics, and imaging informatics will benefit from an integrated approach of piecing together different aspects of personalized information from a dive... View full abstract»

Activity monitoring (AM) is an established technique for the assessment of a person's physical activity. With the rapid rise of smartwatch technology, this platform presents an interesting opportunity to use a device for AM that has both the ability to monitor activity and also the ability to interface seamlessly with other healthcare systems. There are questions however around the suitability of ... View full abstract»

Breast lesion detection using ultrasound imaging is considered an important step of computer-aided diagnosis systems. Over the past decade, researchers have demonstrated the possibilities to automate the initial lesion detection. However, the lack of a common dataset impedes research when comparing the performance of such algorithms. This paper proposes the use of deep learning approaches for brea... View full abstract»

The increasing popularity of wearable devices in recent years means that a diverse range of physiological and functional data can now be captured continuously for applications in sports, wellbeing, and healthcare. This wealth of information requires efficient methods of classification and analysis where deep learning is a promising technique for large-scale data analytics. While deep learning has ... View full abstract»

The idea that the purely phenomenological knowledge that we can extract by analyzing large amounts of data can be useful in healthcare seems to contradict the desire of VPH researchers to build detailed mechanistic models for individual patients. But in practice no model is ever entirely phenomenological or entirely mechanistic. We propose in this position paper that big data analytics can be succ... View full abstract»

We present a smartphone-only solution for the detection of atrial fibrillation (AFib), which utilizes the built-in accelerometer and gyroscope sensors [inertial measurement unit, (IMU)] in the detection. Depending on the patient's situation, it is possible to use the developed smartphone application either regularly or occasionally for making a measurement of the subject. The smartphone is placed ... View full abstract»

We present a novel and time-efficient method for intracoronary lumen detection, which produces three-dimensional (3-D) coronary arteries using optical coherence tomographic (OCT) images. OCT images are acquired for multiple patients and longitudinal cross-section (LOCS) images are reconstructed using different acquisition angles. The lumen contours for each LOCS image are extracted and translated ... View full abstract»

After decades of evolution, measuring instruments for quantitative gait analysis have become an important clinical tool for assessing pathologies manifested by gait abnormalities. However, such instruments tend to be expensive and require expert operation and maintenance besides their high cost, thus limiting them to only a small number of specialized centers. Consequently, gait analysis in most c... View full abstract»

Atopic dermatitis is a chronic inflammatory skin condition affecting both children and adults and is associated with pruritus. A method for objectively quantifying nocturnal scratching events could aid in the development of therapies for atopic dermatitis and other pruritic disorders. High-resolution wrist actigraphy (three-dimensional accelerometer sensors sampled at ≥20 Hz) is a noninvasive meth... View full abstract»

In this paper, we present DREAMER, a multimodal database consisting of electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) signals recorded during affect elicitation by means of audio-visual stimuli. Signals from 23 participants were recorded along with the participants self-assessment of their affective state after each stimuli, in terms of valence, arousal, and dominance. All the signals were... View full abstract»

Continuous blood pressure (BP) estimation using pulse transit time (PTT) is a promising method for unobtrusive BP measurement. However, the accuracy of this approach must be improved for it to be viable for a wide range of applications. This study proposes a novel continuous BP estimation approach that combines data mining techniques with a traditional mechanism-driven model. First, 14 features de... View full abstract»

The identification of invalid data in recordings obtained using wearable sensors is of particular importance since data obtained from mobile patients is, in general, noisier than data obtained from nonmobile patients. In this paper, we present a signal quality index (SQI), which is intended to assess whether reliable heart rates (HRs) can be obtained from electrocardiogram (ECG) and photoplethysmo... View full abstract»

Automatic recognition of activities of daily living (ADL) is an important component in understanding of energy balance, quality of life, and other areas of health and well-being. In our previous work, we had proposed an insole-based activity monitor-SmartStep, designed to be socially acceptable and comfortable. The goals of the current study were: first, validation of SmartStep in recognition of a... View full abstract»

The availability of medical imaging data from clinical archives, research literature, and clinical manuals, coupled with recent advances in computer vision offer the opportunity for image-based diagnosis, teaching, and biomedical research. However, the content and semantics of an image can vary depending on its modality and as such the identification of image modality is an important preliminary s... View full abstract»

Manual scoring (MS) of cardiorespiratory signals is the gold standard method for the analysis of respiratory data in sleep laboratories. In MS, trained, expert scorers characterize respiratory patterns by scrolling through a data record and visually identifying patterns. However, MS is limited by high intraand inter-scorer variability and subjectivity. A strategy to mitigate this is to analyze the... View full abstract»

Asthma is one of the most prevalent and costly chronic conditions in the United States, which cannot be cured. However, accurate and timely surveillance data could allow for timely and targeted interventions at the community or individual level. Current national asthma disease surveillance systems can have data availability lags of up to two weeks. Rapid progress has been made in gathering nontrad... View full abstract»

The accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and its early stage, i.e., mild cognitive impairment, is essential for timely treatment and possible delay of AD. Fusion of multimodal neuroimaging data, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET), has shown its effectiveness for AD diagnosis. The deep polynomial networks (DPN) is a recently proposed deep learn... View full abstract»

In this paper, we perform complex network analysis on a connectivity dataset retrieved from a monitoring system in order to classify simple daily activities. The monitoring system is composed of a set of wearable sensing modules positioned on the subject's body and the connectivity data consists of the correlation between each pair of modules. A number of network measures are then computed followe... View full abstract»

The level set based deformable models (LDM) are commonly used for medical image segmentation. However, they rely on a handcrafted curve evolution velocity that needs to be adapted for each segmentation task. The Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) address this issue by learning robust features in a supervised end-to-end manner. However, CNNs employ millions of network parameters which require a la... View full abstract»

Measurement of gait is becoming important as a tool to identify disease and disease progression, yet to date its application is limited largely to specialist centers. Wearable devices enables gait to be measured in naturalistic environments, however questions remain regarding validity. Previous research suggests that when compared with a laboratory reference, measurement accuracy is acceptable for... View full abstract»

High-efficiency lung nodule detection dramatically contributes to the risk assessment of lung cancer. It is a significant and challenging task to quickly locate the exact positions of lung nodules. Extensive work has been done by researchers around this domain for approximately two decades. However, previous computer-aided detection (CADe) schemes are mostly intricate and time-consuming since they... View full abstract»

Wearable devices are used in various applications to collect information including step information, sleeping cycles, workout statistics, and health-related information. Due to the nature and richness of the data collected by such devices, it is important to ensure the security of the collected data. This paper presents a new lightweight authentication scheme suitable for wearable device deploymen... View full abstract»

Automation-assisted cervical screening via Pap smear or liquid-based cytology (LBC) is a highly effective cell imaging based cancer detection tool, where cells are partitioned into “abnormal” and “normal” categories. However, the success of most traditional classification methods relies on the presence of accurate cell segmentations. Despite sixty years of research in this field, accurate segmenta... View full abstract»

Computer vision-based food recognition could be used to estimate a meal's carbohydrate content for diabetic patients. This study proposes a methodology for automatic food recognition, based on the bag-of-features (BoF) model. An extensive technical investigation was conducted for the identification and optimization of the best performing components involved in the BoF architecture, as well as the ... View full abstract»

Objective: Automatic detection and classification of noises can play a vital role in the development of robust unsupervised electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis systems. This paper proposes a novel unified framework for automatic detection, localization, and classification of single and combined ECG noises. Methods : The proposed framework consists of the modified ensemble empirical mode decomposition... View full abstract»

Deep learning, a relatively new branch of machine learning, has been investigated for use in a variety of biomedical applications. Deep learning algorithms have been used to analyze different physiological signals and gain a better understanding of human physiology for automated diagnosis of abnormal conditions. In this paper, we provide an overview of deep learning approaches with a focus on deep... View full abstract»

In the past decade, there has been a resurgence in the field of unobtrusive cardiomechanical assessment, through advancing methods for measuring and interpreting ballistocardiogram (BCG) and seismocardiogram (SCG) signals. Novel instrumentation solutions have enabled BCG and SCG measurement outside of clinical settings, in the home, in the field, and even in microgravity. Customized signal process... View full abstract»

Fall detection is an important public healthcare problem. Timely detection could enable instant delivery of medical service to the injured. A popular non-intrusive solution for fall detection is based on videos obtained through ambient camera, and the corresponding methods usually require a large dataset to train a classifier and are inclined to be influenced by the image quality. However, it is h... View full abstract»

Electrocardiograph (ECG) denoising is the most important step in diagnosis of heart-related diseases, as the diagnosis gets influenced with noises. In this paper, a new method for ECG denoising is proposed, which incorporates empirical mode decomposition algorithm with Riegmann Liouvelle (RL) fractional integral filtering and Savitzky-Golay (SG) filtering. In the proposed method, noisy ECG signal ... View full abstract»

Unobtrusive activity monitoring can provide valuable information for medical and sports applications. In recent years, human activity recognition has moved to wearable sensors to deal with unconstrained scenarios. Accelerometers are the preferred sensors due to their simplicity and availability. Previous studies have examined several classic techniques for extracting features from acceleration sig... View full abstract»

Using the massive MIMIC physiological data base, we tried to validate pulse wave analysis (PWA) based on multiparameters model whether it can continuously estimate blood pressure (BP) values on single site of one hand. In addition, to consider the limitation of insufficient data acquirement for home user, we used pulse arrival time (PAT) driven BP information to determine the individual scale fact... View full abstract»

Brain electrical activity recordings by electroencephalography (EEG) are often contaminated with signal artifacts. Procedures for automated removal of EEG artifacts are frequently sought for clinical diagnostics and brain-computer interface applications. In recent years, a combination of independent component analysis (ICA) and discrete wavelet transform has been introduced as standard technique f... View full abstract»

There has been an increased interest in speech pattern analysis applications of Parkinsonism for building predictive telediagnosis and telemonitoring models. For this purpose, we have collected a wide variety of voice samples, including sustained vowels, words, and sentences compiled from a set of speaking exercises for people with Parkinson's disease. There are two main issues in learning from su... View full abstract»

Falls are one of the major causes leading to injury of elderly people. Using wearable devices for fall detection has a high cost and may cause inconvenience to the daily lives of the elderly. In this paper, we present an automated fall detection approach that requires only a low-cost depth camera. Our approach combines two computer vision techniques-shape-based fall characterization and a learning... View full abstract»

This paper presents a computer-aided screening system (DREAM) that analyzes fundus images with varying illumination and fields of view, and generates a severity grade for diabetic retinopathy (DR) using machine learning. Classifiers such as the Gaussian Mixture model (GMM), k-nearest neighbor (kNN), support vector machine (SVM), and AdaBoost are analyzed for classifying retinopathy lesions from no... View full abstract»

Bipolar disorder (BD) is characterized by an alternation of mood states from depression to (hypo)mania. Mixed states, i.e., a combination of depression and mania symptoms at the same time, can also be present. The diagnosis of this disorder in the current clinical practice is based only on subjective interviews and questionnaires, while no reliable objective psycho-physiological markers are availa... View full abstract»

ECG-derived respiratory (EDR) signal is an effective and inexpensive method to monitor the respiration. Previous studies have shown that the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) techniques can satisfactorily extract the EDR signal, however, their performances are degraded at the presence of noise. On the other hand, variational mode decomposition (VMD) performs good robustness against noise. In appl... View full abstract»

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. Although polypectomy at early stage reduces CRC incidence, 90% of the polyps are small and diminutive, where removal of them poses risks to patients that may outweigh the benefits. Correctly detecting and predicting polyp type during colonoscopy allows endoscopists to resect and discard the tissue without submitting it for hist... View full abstract»

Early diagnosis of interstitial lung diseases is crucial for their treatment, but even experienced physicians find it difficult, as their clinical manifestations are similar. In order to assist with the diagnosis, computer-aided diagnosis systems have been developed. These commonly rely on a fixed scale classifier that scans CT images, recognizes textural lung patterns, and generates a map of path... View full abstract»

Objective: This paper aims to prove that automatic beat classification on ECG signals can be effectively solved with a pure knowledge-based approach, using an appropriate set of abstract features obtained from the interpretation of the physiological processes underlying the signal. Methods: A set of qualitative morphological and rhythm features are obtained for each heartbeat as a result of the ab... View full abstract»

Automatic identification of sleep stage is an important step in a sleep study. In this paper, we propose a hybrid automatic sleep stage scoring approach, named HyCLASSS, based on single channel electroencephalogram (EEG). HyCLASSS, for the first time, leverages both signal and stage transition features of human sleep for automatic identification of sleep stages. HyCLASSS consists of two parts: A r... View full abstract»

Retinal image analysis is increasingly prominent as a nonintrusive diagnosis method in modern ophthalmology. In this paper, we present a novel method to segment blood vessels and optic disk in the fundus retinal images. The method could be used to support nonintrusive diagnosis in modern ophthalmology since the morphology of the blood vessel and the optic disk is an important indicator for disease... View full abstract»

With the passage of recent federal legislation, many medical institutions are now responsible for reaching target hospital readmission rates. Chronic diseases account for many hospital readmissions and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease has been recently added to the list of diseases for which the United States government penalizes hospitals incurring excessive readmissions. Though there have b... View full abstract»

Recent advances in deep learning have produced encouraging results for biomedical image segmentation; however, outcomes rely heavily on comprehensive annotation. In this paper, we propose a neural network architecture and a new algorithm, known as overlapped region forecast, for the automatic segmentation of gastric cancer images. To the best of our knowledge, this report describes the first time ... View full abstract»

Today's health care is difficult to imagine without the possibility to objectively measure various physiological parameters related to patients' symptoms (from temperature through blood pressure to complex tomographic procedures). Psychiatric care remains a notable exception that heavily relies on patient interviews and self-assessment. This is due to the fact that mental illnesses manifest themse... View full abstract»

The visual attributes of cells, such as the nuclear morphology and chromatin openness, are critical for histopathology image analysis. By learning cell-level visual representation, we can obtain a rich mix of features that are highly reusable for various tasks, such as cell-level classification, nuclei segmentation, and cell counting. In this paper, we propose a unified generative adversarial netw... View full abstract»

We propose a new dataset for the evaluation of food recognition algorithms that can be used in dietary monitoring applications. Each image depicts a real canteen tray with dishes and foods arranged in different ways. Each tray contains multiple instances of food classes. The dataset contains 1027 canteen trays for a total of 3616 food instances belonging to 73 food classes. The food on the tray im... View full abstract»

Thyroid ultrasonography is a widely-used clinical technique for nodule diagnosis in thyroid regions. However, it remains difficult to detect and recognize the nodules due to low contrast, high noise, and diverse appearance of nodules. In today's clinical practice, senior doctors could pinpoint nodules by analyzing global context features, local geometry structure, and intensity changes, which woul... View full abstract»

A method for detecting falls in the homes of older adults using the Microsoft Kinect and a two-stage fall detection system is presented. The first stage of the detection system characterizes a person's vertical state in individual depth image frames, and then segments on ground events from the vertical state time series obtained by tracking the person over time. The second stage uses an ensemble o... View full abstract»