Introduction Mobile applications (“apps”) developed for smartphones and tablets are increasingly used in healthcare, allowing remote patient support or promoting self-health care. Prostate cancer (PC) screening allows for early-stage PC diagnosis, resulting in high rates of curative procedures such as radical prostatectomy. The main complications following surgery are urinary incontinence and erectile

Background Magnetic resonance images (MRI) is the main diagnostic tool for risk stratification and treatment decision in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). However, the holistic feature information of multi-parametric MRIs has not been fully exploited by clinicians to accurately evaluate patients. Objective To help clinicians fully utilize the missed information to regroup patients, we built an end-to-end

Background and objectives Electroporation is the phenomenon by which cell membrane permeability to ions and macromolecules is increased when the cell is briefly exposed to high electric fields. In electroporation-based treatments, such exposure is typically performed by delivering high voltage pulses across needle electrodes in tissue. For a given tissue and pulsing protocol, an electric field magnitude

Background: Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a common arrhythmia that is strongly related to the risk of stroke. Some methods in the literature approach AF diagnosis based on cardiovascular signals of several minutes in length. However, many traditional methods utilized to monitor health status in terms of AF rely on electrocardiograms, which are time consuming and require specialized equipment to collect

Background and Objective Multiple primary cancers significantly threat patient survivability. Predicting the survivability of patients with two cancers is challenging because its stochastic pattern relates with numerous variables. Methods In this study, a Bayesian network (BN) model was proposed to describe the occurrence of two primary cancers and predict the five-year survivability of patients using

Background and objective The accumulation of plaque in the coronary artery of the human heart restricts the path of blood flow in that region and leads to Coronary Artery Disease. This study's goal is to present the pulsatile blood flow conduct through four different levels of constrictions, i.e., healthy, 25%, 50%, and 75% in human left coronary arteries. Methods Using CT scan data of a healthy person

Background and Objective NF-κB can be activated by the canonical and non-canonical pathways. These two pathways interplay via the TRAF1|NIK complex after stimulation by TNF. However existing mathematical models of two pathways are inadequate. In this context, an improved mathematical model is constructed to simulate these two pathways and their coupling stimulated by TNF. Methods A schematic description

Background and objective: The deep neural network model can learn complex non-linear relationships in the data and has superior flexibility and adaptability. A downside of this flexibility is that they are sensitive to initial conditions, both in terms of the initial random weights and in terms of the statistical noise in the training dataset. And the disadvantage caused by adaptability is that deep

Background and Objective Peripherally inserted central catheter (PICC) is a novel drug delivery mode which has been widely used in clinical practice. However, long-term retention and some improper actions of patients may cause some severe complications of PICC, such as the drift and prolapse of its catheter. Clinically, the postoperative care of PICC is mainly completed by nurses. However, they cannot

Background and Objective: Respiratory gating training is a common technique to increase patient proprioception, with the goal of (e.g.) minimizing the effects of organ motion during radiotherapy. In this work, we devise a system based on autoencoders for classification of regular, apnea and unconstrained breathing patterns (i.e. multiclass). Methods: Our approach is based on morphological analysis

Background and Objective:Breast cancer is the most frequent cancer in women. The Spanish healthcare network established population-based screening programs in all Autonomous Communities, where mammograms of asymptomatic women are taken with early diagnosis purposes. Breast density assessed from digital mammograms is a biomarker known to be related to a higher risk to develop breast cancer. It is thus

Background and objectives A constant voltage (DC voltage) is usually used in radiofrequency ablation (RFA) computer models to mimic the radiofrequency voltage. However, in some cases a low frequency sine wave voltage (AC voltage) may be used instead. Our objective was to assess the thermal impact of replacing DC voltage by low-frequency AC voltage in RFA computer modeling. Methods A 2D model was used

Background and Objective Epilepsy is a dynamic disease of neuronal networks and epileptic activity in the brain should be suppressed quickly in the shortest possible time with minimum control signal. Thus, a closed-loop feedback control by using the fixed-time integral super-twisting sliding-mode controller via an optogenetic method is employed for suppressing seizures in the Pinsky-Rinzel (PR) model

Owing to the fundamental significances of peristalsis phenomenon in various biological systems like circulation of blood in vessels, lungs devices, pumping of blood in heart and movement of chyme in the gastrointestinal tract, variety of research by scientist on this topic has been presented in recently years. The peristaltic pumping plays a novel role in various industrial processes like transfer

Background and objective In the observed medical ultrasound image, there is always some speckle noise which suppress the details of images and impairs the value of ultrasonography in diagnosis. This work present a novel despeckling method which effectively exploit non-local self-similarity for restoration of corrupted ultrasound images. The proposed approach consist of three stages. First, an improved

Background & objective This study aims to analyze the stress distributions in temporomandibular joints (TMJs) during the left and right protrusions and explore the mechanical reasons for these stress distributions. Methods Computed tomography and magnet resonance images of 5 asymptomatic subjects were used to reconstruct the bone and soft tissue of the maxillofacial models with a pair of detailed TMJs

Background and Objective: For decades, mathematical models have been used to predict the behavior of physical and biological systems, as well as to define strategies aiming at the minimization of the effects regarding different types of diseases. In the present days, the development of mathematical models to simulate the dynamic behavior of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is considered an

Background and Objective:In this study, we have analysed pretreatment positron-emission tomography/ computed tomography (PET/CT) images of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) patients. We have used a publicly available dataset for our analysis. The clinical features of the patient, PET quantitative parameters, and textural indices from pretreatment PET-CT images are selected for the study

Background The mechanism of glucose regulation in human blood is a nonlinear complicated biological system with uncertain parameters and external disturbances which cannot be imitated accurately by a simple mathematical model. So to achieve an artificial pancreas, a method that does not need a model is necessary. Methods In this paper, a model free third order terminal sliding mode controller is developed

Background and Objective Fatigue is an important cause of operational errors, and human errors are the main cause of accidents. This study is an exploratory study in China. Field tests were conducted on heart rate variability (HRV) parameters and physiological indicators of fatigue among miners in high-altitude, cold and low-oxygen areas. This paper studies heart activity patterns during work fatigue

Background To validate the predictability of reentrant circuit isthmus locations without ventricular tachycardia (VT) induction during high-definition mapping, we used computer methods to analyse sinus rhythm activation in experiments where isthmus location was subsequently verified by mapping reentrant VT circuits. Method In 21 experiments using a canine postinfarction model, bipolar electrograms

Background and Objective The dielectrophoresis (DEP) technique is increasingly being recognised as a potentially valuable tool for non-contact manipulation of numerous cells as well as for biological single cell analysis with non-invasive characterisation of a cell's electrical properties. Several studies have attempted to track multiple cells to characterise their cellular DEP mobility. However, they

Background and objective Sleep apnea is a common sleep disorder, usually diagnosed using an expensive, highly specialized, and inconvenient test called polysomnography. A single SpO2 sensor based on an automated classification system can be developed to simplify the apnea detection. The main objective of this work is to develop a classifier based on a convolution neural network with the capability

Background and Objective Diabetic disease is typically composed because of higher than normal blood sugar levels. Instead the production of insulin may be regarded insufficient. It has been noted in recent days that the percentage of diabetes-affected patients have grown to a larger extent throughout the world. Evidently, this problem must be taken more seriously in the coming days to ensure that the

Background and Objectives: We extend the original mathematical model, i.e., Swanson’s reaction-diffusion equation to the surfaces with no boundary, and we find a new numerical method based on a meshless approach for solving numerically Swanson’s reaction-diffusion model in the square and on the sphere. Methods:To solve numerically the Swanson’s reaction-diffusion model and its extension version, a

Introduction Melanoma is the most aggressive type of skin cancer, and it may arise from a cutaneous pigmented lesion. As artificial intelligence (AI)-based teledermatology services hold promise in redefining the melanoma screening paradigm, a study that evaluates user satisfaction with a smartphone-compatible, AI-based cutaneous pigmented lesion evaluator is lacking. Methods Data was collected between

Background and Objective In flicker-based steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) brain-computer interface (BCI), the system performance decreases due to prolonged repeated visual stimulation. To reduce the performance decrease due to visual fatigue, the zoom motion based steady-state motion visual evoked potentials (SSMVEPs) paradigm had been proposed. In this study, the stimulation parameters

Background and Objectives Temporomandibular joint has been considered one of the most complex joints in human body. Dental articulation hinged upon temporomandibular joint is essential and fundamentally important for dental restoration design and prosthetic/orthodontic occlusion analysis. As digital dentistry rapidly grows, a complete digital work flow requires the use of a digital articulator for

Background and Objective Recently, deep convolutional neural network has significantly improved image classification and image segmentation. If coronary artery disease (CAD) can be diagnosed through machine learning and deep learning, it will significantly reduce the burdens of the doctors and accelerate the critical patient diagnoses. The purpose of the study is to assess the practicability of utilizing

Background and Objective Cartilage cracks and fissures may occur due to certain daily life activities such as sports practice, blunt trauma, and matrix fibrillation during early osteoarthritis. These cracks could further grow at the macroscopic level, alter the load distribution pattern in the matrix, limit the joint range of motion, and disturb chondrocytes synthesis. Cracks' shape and deformations

Background and objective Coronary artery diseases and aortic valve stenosis are two of the main causes of mortality and morbidity worldwide. Stenosis of the aortic valve develops due to calcium deposition on the aortic valve leaflets during the cardiac cycle. Clinical investigations have demonstrated that aortic valve sclerosis not only affects hemodynamic parameters inside the aortic root but also

Background and Objective The outbreak of the current pandemic begun from the first individual of a 55-year old from Hubei province in China, the disease instigated by the new coronavirus spreading across the world. Scientists presently speculate this coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, originated in a bat and by one way or another jumped to another creature, potentially the pangolin, which at that point gave

Background and ObjectiveMorphological diagnosis is a basic clinical task of the short-duration 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG). Due to the scarcity of positive samples and other factors, there is currently no algorithm that is comparable to human experts in ECG morphological recognition. Our objective is to develop an ECG specialist-level deep learning method that can accurately identify ten ECG morphological

Background and Objective: Prostate cancer is one of the most common diseases affecting men worldwide. The Gleason scoring system is the primary diagnostic and prognostic tool for prostate cancer. Furthermore, recent reports indicate that the presence of patterns of the Gleason scale such as the cribriform pattern may also correlate with a worse prognosis compared to other patterns belonging to the

Background and objectives: Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) is a popular neuroimaging technique, used to detect and quantify morphological differences in brain tissues between groups. Widely used in human studies, VBM approaches have tremendous potential for neuroimaging studies in animal models. A significant challenge for applying VBM to small animal studies is the poor understanding of how the design

Background and Objective Face recognition success rate is influenced by illumination, expression, posture change, and other factors, which is due to the low generalization ability of a single convolutional neural network. A new face recognition method based on parallel ensemble learning of convolutional neural networks (CNN) and local binary patterns (LBP) is proposed to solve this problem. It also

Background and Objective Effective sharing and reuse of Electronic Health Records (EHR) requires technological solutions which deal with different representations and different models of data. This includes information models, domain models and, ideally, inference models, which enable clinical decision support based on a knowledge base and facts. Our goal is to develop a framework to support EHR interoperability

Context Early detection of heart disease is an important challenge since 17.3 million people yearly lose their lives due to heart diseases. Besides, any error in diagnosis of cardiac disease can be dangerous and risks an individual's life. Accurate diagnosis is therefore critical in cardiology. Data Mining (DM) classification techniques have been used to diagnosis heart diseases but still limited by

Background and Objectives Surface Electromyography (sEMG) is used mostly for neuromuscular diagnosis, assistive technology, physical rehabilitation, and human-computer interactions. Achieving a precise and lightweight method along with low latency for gesture recognition is still a real-life challenge, especially for rehabilitation and assistive robots. This work aims to introduce a highly accurate

The synovial fluid is a transparent electrolyte solution included in joints to provide lubrication helping the proper movement. It exhibits complex rheological properties due to the interaction among its constituents i.e. hyaluronic acid, albumin, lubricin and phospholipids. In degenerative osteoarthritis and inflammatory rheumatoid arthritis diseases, the quantity of synovial fluid and lubrication

Background and objective According to previous studies, after in vitro fertilization-embryo transfer (IVF-ET) there exist a high early pregnancy loss (EPL) rate. The objectives of this study were to construct a prediction model of embryonic development by using machine learning algorithms based on historical case data, in this way doctors can make more accurate suggestions on the number of patient

Background and Objective Peripheral artery disease, one type of atherosclerosis, is a common medical condition in the world that results from plaque build-up in the peripheral blood vessels. The symptoms of this disease are the senses of pain and weakness in outer muscles. Methods The artery under consideration is called the popliteal artery. In this model, the blood flow is considered as pulsating

Background The number of studies using joint modelling of longitudinal and survival data have increased in the past two decades, but analytical techniques and software shortcomings have remained. A joint model is often used for analysis of a combination of longitudinal sub-model and survival sub-model using shared random effects. Cox regression commonly referring to the survival sub-model, should not

Background and Objective : Early identification of melanoma is conducted through whole-body visual examinations to detect suspicious pigmented lesions, a situation that fluctuates in accuracy depending on the experience and time of the examiner. Computer-aided diagnosis tools for skin lesions are typically trained using pre-selected single-lesion images, taken under controlled conditions, which limits

Background and Objective: In this paper we propose to include an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) within a magnetic resonance (MR) simulator that has been developed in house. With this, we intend to measure the impact, in terms of user experience, of including an ITS in our simulator. Methods: We thoroughly describe the integration procedure and we have tested the benefits of this integration by means

Background and Objective: Image classification is an important task in many medical applications. Methods based on deep learning have made great achievements in the computer vision domain. However, they typically rely on large-scale datasets which are annotated. How to obtain such great datasets is still a serious problem in medical domain. Methods: In this paper, we propose a knowledge-guided adversarial

Background and Objective:Hepatocellular ballooning is an important histological parameter in the diagnosis of nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), and it is considered to be a morphological pattern that indicates the severity and the progression to cirrhosis and liver-related deaths. There remains uncertainty about the pathological criteria for evaluating the spectrum of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease

Background and objective: Automated follicle detection in ovarian ultrasound volumes remains a challenging task. An objective comparison of different follicle-detection approaches is only possible when all are tested on the same data. This paper describes the development and structure of the first publicly accessible USOVA3D database of annotated ultrasound volumes with ovarian follicles. Methods:

Background and objective The instantaneous wave-free ratio (iFR) has been proposed to estimate the hemodynamic severity of atherosclerotic stenosis in coronary arteries. The atherosclerotic stenosis in a proximal coronary artery could change its distal microcirculatory resistance (MR). However, there is a lack of investigation about the effect of MR variation on the blood flow and iFR of stenotic coronary

Background The visual comfort of liquid crystal display (LCD) is the subjective evaluation of the user. It is a multi-dimensional and multi-factor problem, which is affected by the luminous characteristics of the LCD screen, the physiological factors of the user, and some other environmental factors. Methods Based on the theory of visual comfort under the guidance of ergonomics, this paper adopts a

Background and Objective To investigate the effect of the slab thickness in maximum intensity projections (MIPs) on the candidate detection performance of a deep learning-based computer-aided detection (DL-CAD) system for pulmonary nodule detection in CT scans. Methods The public LUNA16 dataset includes 888 CT scans with 1186 nodules annotated by four radiologists. From those scans, MIP images were

Background and Objectives Measurement of arterial compliance is recognized as important for clinical use and for enabling better understanding of circulatory system regulation mechanisms. Estimation of arterial compliance involves either a direct measure of the ratio between arterial volume and pressure changes or an inference from the pulse wave velocity (PWV). In this study we demonstrate an approach

Background and Objective: Diabetes mellitus is a common disorder amounting to 400 million patients worldwide. It is often accompanied by a number of complications, including neuropathy, nephropathy, and cardiovascular diseases. For example, peripheral neuropathy is present among 20–30% of diabetics before the diagnosis is substantiated. For this reason, a reliable detection method for diabetic complications

Background and objective Recent research and tested data suggested that spinal injuries occur more often in a frontal impact. Most of the published information is focused on the lumbar spinal injury with respect to axial compression force by varying the height of drops. Parametric studies on the lumbar spinal injury are very scanty. Therefore, the present investigation aimed to optimize the effects

Background and objectives: The vast size of the histopathology whole slide image poses formidable challenges to its automatic diagnosis. With the goal of computer-aided diagnosis and the insights that suspicious regions are generally easy to identify in thyroid whole slide images (WSIs), we develop an interactive whole slide diagnostic system for thyroid frozen sections based on the suspicious regions

Background and objective : Levodopa/carbidopa intestinal gel infusion is a treatment option for patients of advanced stage of Parkinson's disease. This treatment requires the time-consuming and error-prone conversion of orally taken antiparkinson drugs into an equivalent replacing dose of levodopa/carbidopa, which is delivered via pump. In order to facilitate and speed up this conversion process, we

Background: The size of genomics data has been growing rapidly over the last decade. However, the conventional data analysis techniques are incapable of processing this huge amount of data. For the efficient processing of high dimensional datasets, it is essential to develop some new parallel methods. Methods: In this work, a novel distributed approach is presented using Map-Reduce (MR)-based approach