Background and Objective Deep learning approaches are common in image processing, but often rely on supervised learning, which requires a large volume of training images, usually accompanied by hand-crafted labels. As labelled data are often not available, it would be desirable to develop methods that allow such data to be compiled automatically. In this study, we used a Generative Adversarial Network

This study aimed to predict the risk of Alzheimer-type dementia for persons aged over 75 years old without receiving long-care services using regularly collected claim data. A refined dataset including 48,123 persons was prepared from claim data of health insurance and long-term care insurance in a large city in the metropolitan area in Japan. The utilized features include the age and sex of subjects

Background and objectives : To use a points system based on a logistic regression model to predict a binary event in a given population, the validation of this system is necessary. The most correct way to do this is to calculate discrimination and calibration using bootstrapping. Discrimination can be addressed through the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) and calibration

Background and objective In vascular or hypovascular tissues, elements required for maintaining tissue functions are recruited through diffusion, which is highly related with the permeability of the extracellular matrix in health and injury. Here, we investigate the effect of collagen fibril diameter distribution of bovine Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) tissue on the hydraulic permeability of the

Background and objective: Blood glucose levels in humans change over time. Continuous glucose monitoring system (CGMS), can constantly monitor the change of blood glucose concentration. Given the historical data of blood glucose, predicting the trend of blood glucose in a short term is important for diabetes. Appropriate behaviors can be adopted to prevent hypoglycemia or hyperglycemia. Methods: The

Background and objective Accurate segmentation of prostate and its zones constitute an essential preprocessing step for computer-aided diagnosis and detection system for prostate cancer (PCa) using diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI). However, low signal-to-noise ratio and high variability of prostate anatomic structures are challenging for its segmentation using DWI. We propose a semi-automated framework

This research article proposes an improved Fourier law of heat conduction (Cattaneo-Christov) in presence of heat source/sink. The heat transport characteristics are modeled for mixed convective stagnation point flow by a Riga plate. Flow is generated due to linear stretching velocity. The partial differential system is changed to ordinary differential system through implementing appropriate transformations

Background and Objective: Most healthcare institutions are reorganizing their healthcare delivery systems based on Clinical Pathways (CPs). CPs are novel medical management plans to standardize medical activities, reduce cost, optimize resource usage, and improve the quality of service. However, most CPs are still paper-based and not fully integrated with Health Information Systems (HIS). More CP computerization

Background and objectives: Retinal vessel segmentation (RVS) helps in diagnosing diseases such as hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, and others. Convolutional neural networks are widely used in RVS tasks. However, how to comprehensively evaluate the segmentation results and how to improve the networks’ learning ability are two great challenges. Methods: In this paper, we proposed an ingenious index:

Background and Objective : The present article has simulated to investigate the efficient hemodynamic parameters, the drug persistence, and drug distribution on an abdominal aortic aneurysm. Methods : Blood as a non-Newtonian fluid enters the artery acting as a real pulse waveform; Its behavior is dependent on hematocrit and strain rate. In this simulation of computational fluid dynamic, magnetic nanoparticles

Background - Dyslexia is a disorder characterized by difficulty in reading such as poor speech and sound recognition. They have less capability to relate letters and form words and exhibit poor reading comprehension. Eye-tracking methodologies play a major role in analyzing human cognitive processing. Dyslexia is not a visual impairment disorder but it's a difficulty in phonological processing and

Background and Objective Parkinson's disease (PD) is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system for which currently there is no cure. Its treatment requires long-term, interdisciplinary disease management, and usage of typical medications, including levodopa, dopamine agonists, and enzymes, such as MAO-B inhibitors. The key goal of disease management is to prolong patients' independence

Background and objectives : The nucleus is a complex and dynamic organelle enclosing the major part of the cell's genome. A growing body of evidence suggests that changes in the shape of this organelle can influence cell activities. The other way around, altered nuclear shape may be indicative of impaired cell function. Symmetry is an important aspect of nuclear shape not receiving the attention it

Background and objective: Nanoparticle-mediated targeted drug delivery is a promising option for treatment of atherosclerosis. However, the drug targeting may be affected by multiple factors. Considerable attentions have been focused on the influences of external factors, e.g., magnetic field, drug-loaded particle, but internal factors, e.g., plaque morphology (stenosis degree and shoulder length)

Background and Objective There are many types of skin cancer, and melanoma is the most lethal one. Dermoscopy is an important imaging technique to screen melanoma and other skin lesions. However, Skin lesion classification based on computer-aided diagnostic techniques is a challenging task owing to the scarcity of labeled data and class-imbalanced dataset. It is necessary to apply data augmentation

Background and Objective:Gleason grading system is currently the clinical gold standard for determining prostate cancer aggressiveness. Prostate cancer is typically classified into one of 5 different categories with 1 representing the most indolent disease and 5 reflecting the most aggressive disease. Grades 3 and 4 are the most common and difficult patterns to be discriminated in clinical practice

Background and Objective The detection of a clean and undistorted foetal electrocardiogram (fECG) from non-invasive abdominal recordings is an open research issue. Several physiological and instrumental noise sources hamper this process, even after that powerful fECG extraction algorithms have been used. Wavelet denoising is widely used for the improvement of the SNR in biomedical signal processing

Background and Objective Mini-implants have been developed and effectively used by clinicians as anchorage for orthodontic tooth movement. The objective of this study was to elucidate the stress response of orthodontic forces on the periodontal system, bone tissues, mini-implant and the bracket-enamel interface. Methods Computer tomography images of a commercially available mini-implant, an orthodontic

Background and objective: Affect provides contextual information about the emotional state of a person as he/she communicates in both verbal and/or non-verbal forms. While human’s are great at determining the emotional state of people while they communicate in person, it is challenging and still largely an unsolved problem to computationally determine the emotional state of a person. Methods: Emotional

Background and objectives: Aged people usually are more to be diagnosed with retinal diseases in developed countries. Retinal capillaries leakage into the retina swells and causes an acute vision loss, which is called age-related macular degeneration (AMD). The disease can not be adequately diagnosed solely using fundus images as depth information is not available. The variations in retina volume assist

Background and Objectives:Stroke volume (SV) and cardiac output (CO) are important metrics for hemodynamic management of critically ill patients. Clinically available devices to continuously monitor these metrics are invasive, and less invasive methods perform poorly during hemodynamic instability. Pulse wave velocity (PWV) could potentially improve estimation of SV and CO by providing information

Background and Objective : Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) enable people to control an external device by analyzing the brain's neural activity. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which is an emerging optical imaging technique, is frequently used in non-invasive BCIs. Determining the subject-specific features is an important concern in enhancing the classification accuracy as well as reducing

Background and objective Automatic detection of the masses in mammograms is a big challenge and plays a crucial role to assist radiologists for accurate diagnosis. In this paper, a bilateral image analysis method based on Convolution Neural Network (CNN) is developed for mass detection in mammograms. Methods The proposed bilateral mass detection method consists of two networks: a registration network

Background and objective There are many phenomena that lead to changes in the power spectrum of a given signal, and their detection has been a challenge that has received considerable attention over the years. Objective Response Detection (ORD) techniques are a set of tools that perform automated tests for such a task, allowing thus to automatically track changes in the spectrum. The performance of

A Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) aims to assist physicians, nurses and other professionals in decision-making related to the patient’s clinical condition. CDSSs deal with pertinent and critical data, and special care should be taken in their design to ensure the development of usable, secure and reliable tools. Objective: This paper aims to investigate existing literature dealing with the

Background and objective Total Variation (TV) minimization algorithms have achieved great attention due to the virtue of decreasing noise while preserving edges. The purpose of this work is to implement and evaluate two TV minimization methods in 3D. Their performance is analyzed through 3D visualization of digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) data with volume rendering. Methods Both filters were studied

Background and objective The manual measurement of arterial diameter and wall thickness using imaging modalities demand expertise, and the state-of-art automated or semi-automated measurement features are seldom available in the entry-level systems. The advanced ultrasound modalities are expensive, non-scalable, and less favorable for field and resource-constrained settings. In this work, we present

Background and Objective : Considered as one of the most recurrent types of liver malignancy, Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC) needs to be assessed in a non-invasive way. The objective of the current study is to develop prediction models for Chronic Hepatitis C (CHC)-related HCC using machine learning techniques. Methods : A dataset, for 4423 CHC patients, was investigated to identify the significant

Background and Objective : This research aimed to present an improved side-vented needle and explore its availability as well as the corresponding irrigation strategy. Methods : A CFD model was used to simulate the irrigant flow in a simplified prepared round root canal with an apical delta respectively with different needles for irrigation. The needle types include flat end-tip needle, original side-vented

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE In lung cancer, the determination of mediastinal lymph node (MLN) status as benign or malignant influence treatment planning and survival rate. Invasive pathological tests for the classification of MLNs into benign and malignant have various shortcomings like painfulness, the risk associated with anesthesia, and depends to a large extent on skillset and preferences of the surgeon

Background and Objective Dengue viral infections are a standout amongst the supreme critical mosquito-borne illnesses nowadays. They create problems like dengue fever (DF), dengue stun disorder (DSS) and dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF). Lately, the frequency of DHF has expanded considerably. Dengue may be caused by one of serotypes DEN-1 to DEN-4. For the most part, septicity with one serotype presents

Background and objective Nowadays, the number of pathologies related to food are multiplied. Mycotoxins are one of the most severe food contaminants that cause serious effects on the human health. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an assessment tool for evaluating their impact on the immune response. Recently, a new investigational method using human dendritic cells was endorsed by biologists.

Background Intradialytic hypotension (IDH) is commonly occurred and links to higher mortality among patients undergoing hemodialysis (HD). Its early prediction and prevention will dramatically improve the quality of life. However, predicting the occurrence of IDH clinically is not simple. The aims of this study are to develop an intelligent system with capability of predicting blood pressure (BP) during

Background and Objective Recently, transplant of bypass vein is employed to charge blood fluid inside vein after stenosis position. Because, bypass vein can compensate consequences of stenosis in reducing blood flow within vessels. Therefore, analyses of shear stress for anemia, normal, and hypertensive individuals can prepare a valuable understanding in mechanical geometry which is applicable to design

Background and objective Stepped wedge trials (SWTs) are a type of cluster-randomized trial that are commonly used to evaluate health care interventions. Most SWT-related software packages have restrictive assumptions about the study design and correlation structure of the data. The objective of this paper is to present a package and corresponding web-based graphical user interface (GUI) that provide

Background and Objective : The intra-aortic balloon pump (IABP) is the most widely available device for short-term mechanical circulatory support, often used to wean off cardiopulmonary bypass or combined with extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation support or as a bridge to a left ventricular assist device. Although based on a relatively simple principle, its complex interaction with the cardiovascular

Background and Objective Mitochondrial diseases are a frequent cause of inherited genetic disorders caused by mutations in both the mitochondrial and nuclear human genome. The new technique of high-throughput sequencing, which is used more and more frequently around the world, is most often focused on nuclear DNA. In some cases, such data after proper IT processing could also allow to determine alterations

Background and objective Ultrasound is the non-radioactive imaging modality used in the diagnosis of various diseases related to the internal organs of the body. The presence of speckle noise in ultrasound image (UI) is inevitable and may affect resolution and contrast of the image. Existence of the speckle noise degrades the visual evaluation of the image. The despeckling of UI is a desirable pre-processing

Background and objective: The volume of the intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) obtained from CT scans is essential for quantification and treatment planning. However,a fast and accurate volume acquisition brings great challenges. On the one hand, it is both time consuming and operator dependent for manual segmentation, which is the gold standard for volume estimation. On the other hand, low contrast to

Monte Carlo (MC)-based simulation is the most precise method in scatter correction for Cone-beam CT (CBCT). Nonetheless, the existing MC methods cannot be fully applied in clinical due to its low efficiency. The traditional MC simulations perform calculations via a particle-by-particle scheme, which leads to high computation costs because abundant photons do not reach the X-ray detector in transport

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Tomographic sequences of biomedical images are commonly used to achieve a three-dimensional visualization of the human anatomy. In some cases, the number of images contained in the sequence is limited, e.g., in low-dose computed tomography acquired on neonatal patients, resulting in a coarse and inaccurate 3D reconstruction. METHODS In this paper, volumetric image interpolation

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Accurate dose of compression imposed by functional compression garments, such as medical compression stockings, is critical for medical treatment or rehabilitation. To evaluate or provide fitted compression stockings for individuals, the real curved calf shapes other than just anthropometric parameters are required. METHODS This paper proposes and verifies a simple 3D parametric

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Acute stroke lesion segmentation tasks are of great clinical interest as they can help doctors make better informed time-critical treatment decisions. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is time demanding but can provide images that are considered the gold standard for diagnosis. Automated stroke lesion segmentation can provide with an estimate of the location and volume of the

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Percutaneous puncture with flexible needle has important value in clinical application for its low trauma and flexible path. However, it is difficult to guarantee accuracy and avoid obstacles in puncture process. Therefore, developing a viable path planning method is particularly important. In this research, the bending deformation law of flexible needles during puncture was

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Ultrasound diaphragmatic muscle motion characteristics may provide useful information about normal or abnormal diaphragmatic function and indicate diaphragmatic weakness, or paralysis. In the present work we propose and evaluate an integrated semi-automated analysis system for the quantitative analysis of ultrasonic motion from ultrasound diaphragmatic videos. METHODS The proposed

Background and objective Strong evidence suggests that pelvic soft tissues soften during pregnancy to facilitate vaginal delivery while protecting against maternal birth injury. We hypothesized that these adaptations likely result in changes to the shape of the pelvic floor. Thus, this study aimed to compare midsagittal pelvic floor shapes from MRIs of nulliparous, gravid, and vaginally parous women

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE In recent years, stress and mental health have been considered as important worldwide concerns. Stress detection using physiological signals such as electrocardiogram (ECG), skin conductance (SC), electromyogram (EMG) and electroencephalogram (EEG) is a traditional approach. However, the effect of stress on the EMG signal of different muscles and the efficacy of combination

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE As we all know, mathematical models provide very important information for the study of the human immunodeficiency virus type. Mathematical model of human immunodeficiency virus type-1 (HIV-1) infection with contact rate represented by Crowley-Martin function response is taken into account. The aims of this novel study is to checkthe local and global stability of the disease

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Biometric measurements of fetal head are important indicators for maternal and fetal health monitoring during pregnancy. 3D ultrasound (US) has unique advantages over 2D scan in covering the whole fetal head and may promote the diagnoses. However, automatically segmenting the whole fetal head in US volumes still pends as an emerging and unsolved problem. The challenges that