Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

A new generative approach for optical coherence tomography data scarcity: unpaired mutual conversion between scanning presets
AbstractIn optical coherence tomography (OCT), there is a trade-off between the scanning time and image quality, leading to a scarcity of high quality data. OCT platforms provide different scanning presets, producing visually distinct images, limiting their compatibility. In this work, a fully automatic methodology for the unpaired visual conversion of the two most prevalent scanning presets is proposed. Using contrastive unpaired translation generative adversarial architectures, low quality images acquired with the fasterMacular Cube preset can be converted to the visual style of high visibilitySeven Lines scans and vice-...
Source: Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing - April 12, 2023 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

COVID-19 ’s influence on cardiac function: a machine learning perspective on ECG analysis
AbstractIn December 2019, the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to the world gave rise to probably the biggest public health problem in the world: the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially seen only as a disease of the respiratory system, COVID-19 is actually a blood disease with effects on the respiratory tract. Considering its influence on hematological parameters, how does COVID-19 affect cardiac function? Is it possible to support the clinical diagnosis of COVID-19 from the automatic analysis of electrocardiography? In this work, we sought to investigate how COVID-19 affects cardiac function using a machine learning approach to an...
Source: Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing - April 12, 2023 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

Effects of powered ankle –foot orthoses mass distribution on lower limb muscle forces—a simulation study
AbstractThis simulation study aimed to explore the effects of mass and mass distribution of powered ankle –foot orthoses, on net joint moments and individual muscle forces throughout the lower limb. Using OpenSim inverse kinematics, dynamics, and static optimization tools, the gait cycles of ten subjects were analyzed. The biomechanical models of these subjects were appended with ideal powered ankle– foot orthoses of different masses and actuator positions, as to determine the effect that these design factors had on the subject’s kinetics during normal walking. It was found that when the mass of the device was distri...
Source: Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing - April 12, 2023 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

Quantification of body ownership awareness induced by the visual movement illusion of the lower limbs: a study of electroencephalogram and surface electromyography
AbstractThe visual movement illusion (VMI) is a subjective experience. This illusion is produced by watching the subject ’s motion video. At the same time, VMI evokes awareness of body ownership. We applied the power spectral density (PSD) matrix and the partial directed correlation (PDC) matrix to build the PPDC matrix for the γ2 band (34 –98.5 Hz), combining cerebral cortical and musculomotor cortical complexity and PPDC to quantify the degree of body ownership. Thirty-five healthy subjects were recruited to participate in this experiment. The subjects’ electroencephalography (EEG) and surface electromyography (s...
Source: Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing - April 12, 2023 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

Capped L21-norm-based common spatial patterns for EEG signals classification applicable to BCI systems
AbstractThe common spatial patterns (CSP) technique is an effective strategy for the classification of multichannel electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. However, the objective function expression of the conventional CSP algorithm is based on the L2-norm, which makes the performance of the method easily affected by outliers and noise. In this paper, we consider a new extension to CSP, which is termed capped L21-norm-based common spatial patterns (CCSP-L21), by using the capped L21-norm rather than the L2-norm for robust modeling. L21-norm considers the L1-norm sum which largely alleviates the influence of outliers and noise ...
Source: Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing - April 12, 2023 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

Multivendor fully automatic uncertainty management approaches for the intuitive representation of DME fluid accumulations in OCT images
AbstractDiabetes represents one of the main causes of blindness in developed countries, caused by fluid accumulations in the retinal layers. The clinical literature defines the different types of diabetic macular edema (DME) as cystoid macular edema (CME), diffuse retinal thickening (DRT), and serous retinal detachment (SRD), each with its own clinical relevance. These fluid accumulations do not present defined borders that facilitate segmentational approaches (specially the DRT type, usually not taken into account by the state of the art for this reason) so a diffuse paradigm is used for its detection and visualization. I...
Source: Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing - April 12, 2023 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

Characterization of noise in long-term ECG monitoring with machine learning based on clinical criteria
AbstractNoise and artifacts affect strongly the quality of the electrocardiogram (ECG) in long-term ECG monitoring (LTM), making some of its parts impractical for diagnosis. The clinical severity of noise defines a qualitative quality score according to the manner clinicians make the interpretation of the ECG, in contrast to assess noise from a quantitative standpoint. So clinical noise refers to a scale of different levels of qualitative severity of noise which aims at elucidating which ECG fragments are valid to achieve diagnosis from a clinical point of view, unlike the traditional approach, which assesses noise in term...
Source: Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing - April 3, 2023 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

Leukocyte subtype classification with multi-model fusion
AbstractAccurate classification of leukocytes is crucial for the diagnosis of hematologic malignancies, particularly leukemia. However, traditional leukocyte classification methods are time-consuming and subject to subjective interpretation by examiners. To address this issue, we aimed to develop a leukocyte classification system capable of accurately classifying 11 leukocyte classes, which would aid radiologists in diagnosing leukemia. Our proposed two-stage classification scheme involved a multi-model fusion based on ResNet for rough leukocyte classification, which focused on shape features, followed by fine-grained leuk...
Source: Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing - April 3, 2023 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

A temporal multi-scale hybrid attention network for sleep stage classification
AbstractSleep is crucial for human health. Automatic sleep stage classification based on polysomnogram (PSG) is meaningful for the diagnosis of sleep disorders, which has attracted extensive attention in recent years. Most existing methods could not fully consider the different transitions of sleep stages and fit the visual inspection of sleep experts simultaneously. To this end, we propose a temporal multi-scale hybrid attention network, namely TMHAN, to automatically achieve sleep staging. The temporal multi-scale mechanism incorporates short-term abrupt and long-term periodic transitions of the successive PSG epochs. Fu...
Source: Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing - March 31, 2023 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

Design of a piezoelectrically actuated hydrocephalus shunt valve
AbstractHydrocephalus is currently managed by using traditional mechanical passive shunts. Due to their nature, these shunts have fundamental shortcomings including an increase in patient shunt dependency, absence of fault detection, and over drainage due to lack of shunt proactivity. There is a scientific consensus that the way forward to address these issues is through what is termed a smart shunt. The core component of this system is the mechatronic controllable valve. A design of a valve which utilises both the passive nature of the classical valves and the controllability feature of the fully automated valves is prese...
Source: Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing - March 30, 2023 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

Cueing effect of attention among nurses with different anxiety levels: an EEG study
In this study, we utilized the event-related potential (ERP) and functional brain networks to investigate the neural mechanism of the cueing attention differences between anxiety and non-anxiety nurse groups (AG-20 nurses; NAG-20 nurses) in the spatial cueing task. The results revealed that in the invalid cues (144 trials), longer reaction times, larger P2 amplitudes, and more linkages between the right frontal and parietal areas were found in AG compared to NAG. In the valid cues (288 trials), there were no significant behavioral and neural differences between the two groups. The AG in the invalid cues showed slower respo...
Source: Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing - March 29, 2023 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

Effect of muscle activation on dynamic responses of neck of pilot during emergency ejection: a finite element study
AbstractTo determine the effect of muscle activation on the dynamic responses of the neck of a pilot during simulated emergency ejections. A complete finite element model of the pilot ’s head and neck was developed and dynamically validated. Three muscle activation curves were designed to simulate different activation times and levels of muscles during pilot ejection: A is the unconscious activation curve of the neck muscles, B is the pre-activation curve, and C is the continuo us activation curve. The acceleration-time curves obtained during ejection were applied to the model, and the influence of the muscles on the dyn...
Source: Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing - March 28, 2023 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

A computational musculoskeletal arm model for assessing muscle dysfunction in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
AbstractComputational models have been used extensively to assess diseases and disabilities effects on musculoskeletal system dysfunction. In the current study, we developed a two degree-of-freedom subject-specific second-order task-specific arm model for characterizing upper-extremity function (UEF) to assess muscle dysfunction due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Older adults (65  years or older) with and without COPD and healthy young control participants (18 to 30 years) were recruited. First, we evaluated the musculoskeletal arm model using electromyography (EMG) data. Second, we compared the computa...
Source: Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing - March 27, 2023 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

Biomechanical analysis of Instrumented decompression and Interbody fusion procedures in Lumbar spine: a finite element analysis study
AbstractInterbody fusions have become increasingly popular to achieve good fusion rates. Also, unilateral instrumentation is favored to minimize soft tissue injury with limited hardware. Limited finite element studies are available in the literature to validate these clinical implications. A three-dimensional, non-linear ligamentous attachment finite element model of L3-L4 was created and validated. The intact L3-L4 model was modified to simulate procedures like laminectomy with bilateral pedicle screw Instrumentation, transforaminal, and posterior lumbar interbody fusion (TLIF and PLIF, respectively) with unilateral and b...
Source: Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing - March 27, 2023 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research

Predicting heart failure in-hospital mortality by integrating longitudinal and category data in electronic health records
AbstractHeart failure is a life-threatening syndrome that is diagnosed in 3.6 million people worldwide each year. We propose a deep fusion learning model (DFL-IMP) that uses time series and category data from electronic health records to predict in-hospital mortality in patients with heart failure. We considered 41 time series features (platelets, white blood cells, urea nitrogen, etc.) and 17 category features (gender, insurance, marital status, etc.) as predictors, all of which were available within the time of the patient ’s last hospitalization, and a total of 7696 patients participated in the observational study. Ou...
Source: Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing - March 24, 2023 Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research