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Neurodegenerative diseases pose a formidable challenge to medical research, demanding a nuanced understanding of their progressive nature. In this regard, latent generative models can effectively be used in a data-driven modeling of different dimensions of neurodegeneration, framed within the context of the manifold hypothesis. This paper proposes a joint framework for a multi-modal, common latent generative model to address the need for a more comprehensive understanding of the neurodegenerative landscape in the context of Parkinson's disease (PD). The proposed architecture uses coupled variational autoencoders (VAEs) to joint model a common latent space to both neuroimaging and clinical data from the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI). Alternative loss functions, different normalization procedures, and the interpretability and explainability of latent generative models are addressed, leading to a model that was able to predict clinical symptomatology in the test set, as measured by the unified Parkinson's disease rating scale (UPDRS), with R2 up to 0.86 for same-modality and 0.441 cross-modality (using solely neuroimaging). The findings provide a foundation for further advancements in the field of clinical research and practice, with potential applications in decision-making processes for PD. The study also highlights the limitations and capabilities of the proposed model, emphasizing its direct interpretability and potential impact on understanding and interpreting neuroimaging patterns associated with PD symptomatology.

Objective. Myocarditis poses a significant health risk, often precipitated by viral infections like coronavirus disease, and can lead to fatal cardiac complications. As a less invasive alternative to the standard diagnostic practice of endomyocardial biopsy, which is highly invasive and thus limited to severe cases, cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging offers a promising solution for detecting myocardial abnormalities. Approach. This study introduces a deep model called ELRL-MD that combines ensemble learning and reinforcement learning (RL) for effective myocarditis diagnosis from CMR images. The model begins with pre-training via the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm to enhance the starting point for learning. An array of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) then works in concert to extract and integrate features from CMR images for accurate diagnosis. Leveraging the Z-Alizadeh Sani myocarditis CMR dataset, the model employs RL to navigate the dataset's imbalance by conceptualizing diagnosis as a decision-making process. Main results. ELRL-DM demonstrates remarkable efficacy, surpassing other deep learning, conventional machine learning, and transfer learning models, achieving an F-measure of 88.2% and a geometric mean of 90.6%. Extensive experimentation helped pinpoint the optimal reward function settings and the perfect count of CNNs. Significance. The study addresses the primary technical challenge of inherent data imbalance in CMR imaging datasets and the risk of models converging on local optima due to suboptimal initial weight settings. Further analysis, leaving out ABC and RL components, confirmed their contributions to the model's overall performance, underscoring the effectiveness of addressing these critical technical challenges., (© 2024 Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine.)

Mitochondrial membrane protein-associated neurodegeneration (MPAN) is an ultraorphan neurogenetic disease from the group of neurodegeneration with brain iron accumulation (NBIA) disorders. Here we report cross-sectional and longitudinal data to define the phenotype, to assess disease progression and to estimate sample sizes for clinical trials. We enrolled patients with genetically confirmed MPAN from the Treat Iron-Related Childhood-Onset Neurodegeneration (TIRCON) registry and cohort study, and from additional sites. Linear mixed-effect modelling (LMEM) was used to calculate annual progression rates for the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS), Barry-Albright Dystonia (BAD) scale, Schwab and England Activities of Daily Living (SE-ADL) scale and the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory (PedsQL). We investigated 85 MPAN patients cross-sectionally, with functional outcome data collected in 45. Median age at onset was 9 years and the median diagnostic delay was 5 years. The most common findings were gait disturbance (99%), pyramidal involvement (95%), dysarthria (90%), vision disturbances (82%), with all but dysarthria presenting early in the disease course. After 16 years with the disease, 50% of patients were wheelchair dependent. LMEM showed an annual progression rate of 4.5 points in total UPDRS. The total BAD scale score showed no significant progression over time. The SE-ADL scale and the patient- and parent-reported PedsQL showed a decline of 3.9%, 2.14 and 2.05 points, respectively. No patient subpopulations were identified based on longitudinal trajectories. Our cross-sectional results define the order of onset and frequency of symptoms in MPAN, which will inform the diagnostic process, help to shorten diagnostic delay and aid in counselling patients, parents and caregivers. Our longitudinal findings define the natural history of MPAN, reveal the most responsive outcomes and highlight the need for an MPAN-specific rating approach. Our sample size estimations inform the design of upcoming clinical trials., (© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Novel features derived from imaging and artificial intelligence systems are commonly coupled to construct computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems that are intended as clinical support tools or for investigation of complex biological patterns. This study used sulcal patterns from structural images of the brain as the basis for classifying patients with schizophrenia from unaffected controls. Statistical, machine learning and deep learning techniques were sequentially applied as a demonstration of how a CAD system might be comprehensively evaluated in the absence of prior empirical work or extant literature to guide development, and the availability of only small sample datasets. Sulcal features of the entire cerebral cortex were derived from 58 schizophrenia patients and 56 healthy controls. No similar CAD systems has been reported that uses sulcal features from the entire cortex. We considered all the stages in a CAD system workflow: preprocessing, feature selection and extraction, and classification. The explainable AI techniques Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations and SHapley Additive exPlanations were applied to detect the relevance of features to classification. At each stage, alternatives were compared in terms of their performance in the context of a small sample. Differentiating sulcal patterns were located in temporal and precentral areas, as well as the collateral fissure. We also verified the benefits of applying dimensionality reduction techniques and validation methods, such as resubstitution with upper bound correction, to optimize performance., (© 2024 The Authors. Human Brain Mapping published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

Nowadays, many people worldwide suffer from brain disorders, and their health is in danger. So far, numerous methods have been proposed for the diagnosis of Schizophrenia (SZ) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), among which functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) modalities are known as a popular method among physicians. This paper presents an SZ and ADHD intelligent detection method of resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) modality using a new deep learning method. The University of California Los Angeles dataset, which contains the rs-fMRI modalities of SZ and ADHD patients, has been used for experiments. The FMRIB software library toolbox first performed preprocessing on rs-fMRI data. Then, a convolutional Autoencoder model with the proposed number of layers is used to extract features from rs-fMRI data. In the classification step, a new fuzzy method called interval type-2 fuzzy regression (IT2FR) is introduced and then optimized by genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization, and gray wolf optimization (GWO) techniques. Also, the results of IT2FR methods are compared with multilayer perceptron, k-nearest neighbors, support vector machine, random forest, and decision tree, and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system methods. The experiment results show that the IT2FR method with the GWO optimization algorithm has achieved satisfactory results compared to other classifier methods. Finally, the proposed classification technique was able to provide 72.71% accuracy., (© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2022. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.)

The integration of positron emission tomography (PET) and single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) imaging techniques with machine learning (ML) algorithms, including deep learning (DL) models, is a promising approach. This integration enhances the precision and efficiency of current diagnostic and treatment strategies while offering invaluable insights into disease mechanisms. In this comprehensive review, we delve into the transformative impact of ML and DL in this domain. Firstly, a brief analysis is provided of how these algorithms have evolved and which are the most widely applied in this domain. Their different potential applications in nuclear imaging are then discussed, such as optimization of image adquisition or reconstruction, biomarkers identification, multimodal fusion and the development of diagnostic, prognostic, and disease progression evaluation systems. This is because they are able to analyse complex patterns and relationships within imaging data, as well as extracting quantitative and objective measures. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges in implementation, such as data standardization and limited sample sizes, and explore the clinical opportunities and future horizons, including data augmentation and explainable AI. Together, these factors are propelling the continuous advancement of more robust, transparent, and reliable systems., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Emotions are a critical aspect of daily life and serve a crucial role in human decision-making, planning, reasoning, and other mental states. As a result, they are considered a significant factor in human interactions. Human emotions can be identified through various sources, such as facial expressions, speech, behavior (gesture/position), or physiological signals. The use of physiological signals can enhance the objectivity and reliability of emotion detection. Compared with peripheral physiological signals, electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings are directly generated by the central nervous system and are closely related to human emotions. EEG signals have the great spatial resolution that facilitates the evaluation of brain functions, making them a popular modality in emotion recognition studies. Emotion recognition using EEG signals presents several challenges, including signal variability due to electrode positioning, individual differences in signal morphology, and lack of a universal standard for EEG signal processing. Moreover, identifying the appropriate features for emotion recognition from EEG data requires further research. Finally, there is a need to develop more robust artificial intelligence (AI) including conventional machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) methods to handle the complex and diverse EEG signals associated with emotional states. This paper examines the application of DL techniques in emotion recognition from EEG signals and provides a detailed discussion of relevant articles. The paper explores the significant challenges in emotion recognition using EEG signals, highlights the potential of DL techniques in addressing these challenges, and suggests the scope for future research in emotion recognition using DL techniques. The paper concludes with a summary of its findings., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The outbreak of the corona virus disease (COVID-19) has changed the lives of most people on Earth. Given the high prevalence of this disease, its correct diagnosis in order to quarantine patients is of the utmost importance in the steps of fighting this pandemic. Among the various modalities used for diagnosis, medical imaging, especially computed tomography (CT) imaging, has been the focus of many previous studies due to its accuracy and availability. In addition, automation of diagnostic methods can be of great help to physicians. In this paper, a method based on pre-trained deep neural networks is presented, which, by taking advantage of a cyclic generative adversarial net (CycleGAN) model for data augmentation, has reached state-of-the-art performance for the task at hand, i.e., 99.60% accuracy. Also, in order to evaluate the method, a dataset containing 3163 images from 189 patients has been collected and labeled by physicians. Unlike prior datasets, normal data have been collected from people suspected of having COVID-19 disease and not from data from other diseases, and this database is made available publicly. Moreover, the method's reliability is further evaluated by calibration metrics, and its decision is interpreted by Grad-CAM also to find suspicious regions as another output of the method and make its decisions trustworthy and explainable., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

In recent years, cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) have become one of the leading causes of mortality globally. At early stages, CVDs appear with minor symptoms and progressively get worse. The majority of people experience symptoms such as exhaustion, shortness of breath, ankle swelling, fluid retention, and other symptoms when starting CVD. Coronary artery disease (CAD), arrhythmia, cardiomyopathy, congenital heart defect (CHD), mitral regurgitation, and angina are the most common CVDs. Clinical methods such as blood tests, electrocardiography (ECG) signals, and medical imaging are the most effective methods used for the detection of CVDs. Among the diagnostic methods, cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMRI) is increasingly used to diagnose, monitor the disease, plan treatment and predict CVDs. Coupled with all the advantages of CMR data, CVDs diagnosis is challenging for physicians as each scan has many slices of data, and the contrast of it might be low. To address these issues, deep learning (DL) techniques have been employed in the diagnosis of CVDs using CMR data, and much research is currently being conducted in this field. This review provides an overview of the studies performed in CVDs detection using CMR images and DL techniques. The introduction section examined CVDs types, diagnostic methods, and the most important medical imaging techniques. The following presents research to detect CVDs using CMR images and the most significant DL methods. Another section discussed the challenges in diagnosing CVDs from CMRI data. Next, the discussion section discusses the results of this review, and future work in CVDs diagnosis from CMR images and DL techniques are outlined. Finally, the most important findings of this study are presented in the conclusion section., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

A connection between the general linear model (GLM) with frequentist statistical testing and machine learning (MLE) inference is derived and illustrated. Initially, the estimation of GLM parameters is expressed as a Linear Regression Model (LRM) of an indicator matrix; that is, in terms of the inverse problem of regressing the observations. Both approaches, i.e. GLM and LRM, apply to different domains, the observation and the label domains, and are linked by a normalization value in the least-squares solution. Subsequently, we derive a more refined predictive statistical test: the linear Support Vector Machine (SVM), that maximizes the class margin of separation within a permutation analysis. This MLE-based inference employs a residual score and associated upper bound to compute a better estimation of the actual (real) error. Experimental results demonstrate how parameter estimations derived from each model result in different classification performance in the equivalent inverse problem. Moreover, using real data, the MLE-based inference including model-free estimators demonstrates an efficient trade-off between type I errors and statistical power.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a brain condition characterized by diverse signs and symptoms that appear in early childhood. ASD is also associated with communication deficits and repetitive behavior in affected individuals. Various ASD detection methods have been developed, including neuroimaging modalities and psychological tests. Among these methods, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) imaging modalities are of paramount importance to physicians. Clinicians rely on MRI modalities to diagnose ASD accurately. The MRI modalities are non-invasive methods that include functional (fMRI) and structural (sMRI) neuroimaging methods. However, diagnosing ASD with fMRI and sMRI for specialists is often laborious and time-consuming; therefore, several computer-aided design systems (CADS) based on artificial intelligence (AI) have been developed to assist specialist physicians. Conventional machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) are the most popular schemes of AI used for diagnosing ASD. This study aims to review the automated detection of ASD using AI. We review several CADS that have been developed using ML techniques for the automated diagnosis of ASD using MRI modalities. There has been very limited work on the use of DL techniques to develop automated diagnostic models for ASD. A summary of the studies developed using DL is provided in the Supplementary Appendix. Then, the challenges encountered during the automated diagnosis of ASD using MRI and AI techniques are described in detail. Additionally, a graphical comparison of studies using ML and DL to diagnose ASD automatically is discussed. We suggest future approaches to detecting ASDs using AI techniques and MRI neuroimaging., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Moridian, Ghassemi, Jafari, Salloum-Asfar, Sadeghi, Khodatars, Shoeibi, Khosravi, Ling, Subasi, Alizadehsani, Gorriz, Abdulla and Acharya.)

Epilepsy is a disorder of the brain denoted by frequent seizures. The symptoms of seizure include confusion, abnormal staring, and rapid, sudden, and uncontrollable hand movements. Epileptic seizure detection methods involve neurological exams, blood tests, neuropsychological tests, and neuroimaging modalities. Among these, neuroimaging modalities have received considerable attention from specialist physicians. One method to facilitate the accurate and fast diagnosis of epileptic seizures is to employ computer-aided diagnosis systems (CADS) based on deep learning (DL) and neuroimaging modalities. This paper has studied a comprehensive overview of DL methods employed for epileptic seizures detection and prediction using neuroimaging modalities. First, DL-based CADS for epileptic seizures detection and prediction using neuroimaging modalities are discussed. Also, descriptions of various datasets, preprocessing algorithms, and DL models which have been used for epileptic seizures detection and prediction have been included. Then, research on rehabilitation tools has been presented, which contains brain-computer interface (BCI), cloud computing, internet of things (IoT), hardware implementation of DL techniques on field-programmable gate array (FPGA), etc. In the discussion section, a comparison has been carried out between research on epileptic seizure detection and prediction. The challenges in epileptic seizures detection and prediction using neuroimaging modalities and DL models have been described. In addition, possible directions for future works in this field, specifically for solving challenges in datasets, DL, rehabilitation, and hardware models, have been proposed. The final section is dedicated to the conclusion which summarizes the significant findings of the paper., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Schizophrenia (SZ) is a mental disorder that typically emerges in late adolescence or early adulthood. It reduces the life expectancy of patients by 15 years. Abnormal behavior, perception of emotions, social relationships, and reality perception are among its most significant symptoms. Past studies have revealed that SZ affects the temporal and anterior lobes of hippocampus regions of the brain. Also, increased volume of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and decreased volume of white and gray matter can be observed due to this disease. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the popular neuroimaging technique used to explore structural/functional brain abnormalities in SZ disorder, owing to its high spatial resolution. Various artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have been employed with advanced image/signal processing methods to accurately diagnose SZ. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of studies conducted on the automated diagnosis of SZ using MRI modalities. First, an AI-based computer aided-diagnosis system (CADS) for SZ diagnosis and its relevant sections are presented. Then, this section introduces the most important conventional machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques in the diagnosis of diagnosing SZ. A comprehensive comparison is also made between ML and DL studies in the discussion section. In the following, the most important challenges in diagnosing SZ are addressed. Future works in diagnosing SZ using AI techniques and MRI modalities are recommended in another section. Results, conclusion, and research findings are also presented at the end., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Aims : Brain diseases refer to intracranial tissue and organ inflammation, vascular diseases, tumors, degeneration, malformations, genetic diseases, immune diseases, nutritional and metabolic diseases, poisoning, trauma, parasitic diseases, etc. Taking Alzheimer's disease (AD) as an example, the number of patients dramatically increases in developed countries. By 2025, the number of elderly patients with AD aged 65 and over will reach 7.1 million, an increase of nearly 29% over the 5.5 million patients of the same age in 2018. Unless medical breakthroughs are made, AD patients may increase from 5.5 million to 13.8 million by 2050, almost three times the original. Researchers have focused on developing complex machine learning (ML) algorithms, i.e., convolutional neural networks (CNNs), containing millions of parameters. However, CNN models need many training samples. A small number of training samples in CNN models may lead to overfitting problems. With the continuous research of CNN, other networks have been proposed, such as randomized neural networks (RNNs). Schmidt neural network (SNN), random vector functional link (RVFL), and extreme learning machine (ELM) are three types of RNNs. Methods : We propose three novel models to classify brain diseases to cope with these problems. The proposed models are DenseNet-based SNN (DSNN), DenseNet-based RVFL (DRVFL), and DenseNet-based ELM (DELM). The backbone of the three proposed models is the pre-trained "customize" DenseNet. The modified DenseNet is fine-tuned on the empirical dataset. Finally, the last five layers of the fine-tuned DenseNet are substituted by SNN, ELM, and RVFL, respectively. Results : Overall, the DSNN gets the best performance among the three proposed models in classification performance. We evaluate the proposed DSNN by five-fold cross-validation. The accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, and F1-score of the proposed DSNN on the test set are 98.46% ± 2.05%, 100.00% ± 0.00%, 85.00% ± 20.00%, 98.36% ± 2.17%, and 99.16% ± 1.11%, respectively. The proposed DSNN is compared with restricted DenseNet, spiking neural network, and other state-of-the-art methods. Finally, our model obtains the best results among all models. Conclusions : DSNN is an effective model for classifying brain diseases., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Zhu, Lu, Wang, Gorriz and Zhang.)

Implantable high-density multichannel neural recording microsystems provide simultaneous recording of brain activities. Wireless transmission of the entire recorded data causes high bandwidth usage, which is not tolerable for implantable applications. As a result, a hardware-friendly compression module is required to reduce the amount of data before it is transmitted. This paper presents a novel compression approach that utilizes a spike extractor and a vector quantization (VQ)-based spike compressor. In this approach, extracted spikes are vector quantized using an unsupervised learning process providing a high spike compression ratio (CR) of 10-80. A combination of extracting and compressing neural spikes results in a significant data reduction as well as preserving the spike waveshapes. The compression performance of the proposed approach was evaluated under variant conditions. We also developed new architectures such that the hardware blocks of our approach can be implemented more efficiently. The compression module was implemented in a 180-nm standard CMOS process achieving a SNDR of 14.49[Formula: see text]dB and a classification accuracy (CA) of 99.62% at a CR of 20, while consuming 4[Formula: see text][Formula: see text]W power and 0.16[Formula: see text]mm 2 chip area per channel.

COVID-19 pneumonia started in December 2019 and caused large casualties and huge economic losses. In this study, we intended to develop a computer-aided diagnosis system based on artificial intelligence to automatically identify the COVID-19 in chest computed tomography images. We utilized transfer learning to obtain the image-level representation (ILR) based on the backbone deep convolutional neural network. Then, a novel neighboring aware representation (NAR) was proposed to exploit the neighboring relationships between the ILR vectors. To obtain the neighboring information in the feature space of the ILRs, an ILR graph was generated based on the k -nearest neighbors algorithm, in which the ILRs were linked with their k -nearest neighboring ILRs. Afterward, the NARs were computed by the fusion of the ILRs and the graph. On the basis of this representation, a novel end-to-end COVID-19 classification architecture called neighboring aware graph neural network (NAGNN) was proposed. The private and public data sets were used for evaluation in the experiments. Results revealed that our NAGNN outperformed all the 10 state-of-the-art methods in terms of generalization ability. Therefore, the proposed NAGNN is effective in detecting COVID-19, which can be used in clinical diagnosis., Competing Interests: The authors declare that there are no conflict of interests., (© 2021 Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

Schizophrenia (SZ) is a mental disorder whereby due to the secretion of specific chemicals in the brain, the function of some brain regions is out of balance, leading to the lack of coordination between thoughts, actions, and emotions. This study provides various intelligent deep learning (DL)-based methods for automated SZ diagnosis via electroencephalography (EEG) signals. The obtained results are compared with those of conventional intelligent methods. To implement the proposed methods, the dataset of the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology in Warsaw, Poland, has been used. First, EEG signals were divided into 25 s time frames and then were normalized by z -score or norm L2. In the classification step, two different approaches were considered for SZ diagnosis via EEG signals. In this step, the classification of EEG signals was first carried out by conventional machine learning methods, e.g., support vector machine, k -nearest neighbors, decision tree, naïve Bayes, random forest, extremely randomized trees, and bagging. Various proposed DL models, namely, long short-term memories (LSTMs), one-dimensional convolutional networks (1D-CNNs), and 1D-CNN-LSTMs, were used in the following. In this step, the DL models were implemented and compared with different activation functions. Among the proposed DL models, the CNN-LSTM architecture has had the best performance. In this architecture, the ReLU activation function with the z -score and L2-combined normalization was used. The proposed CNN-LSTM model has achieved an accuracy percentage of 99.25%, better than the results of most former studies in this field. It is worth mentioning that to perform all simulations, the k -fold cross-validation method with k = 5 has been used., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Shoeibi, Sadeghi, Moridian, Ghassemi, Heras, Alizadehsani, Khadem, Kong, Nahavandi, Zhang and Gorriz.)

Predicting functional outcomes after surgery and early adjuvant treatment is difficult due to the complex, extended, interlocking brain networks that underpin cognition. The aim of this study was to test glioma functional interactions with the rest of the brain, thereby identifying the risk factors of cognitive recovery or deterioration. Seventeen patients with diffuse non-enhancing glioma (aged 22-56 years) were longitudinally MRI scanned and cognitively assessed before and after surgery and during a 12-month recovery period (55 MRI scans in total after exclusions). We initially found, and then replicated in an independent dataset, that the spatial correlation pattern between regional and global BOLD signals (also known as global signal topography) was associated with tumour occurrence. We then estimated the coupling between the BOLD signal from within the tumour and the signal extracted from different brain tissues. We observed that the normative global signal topography is reorganised in glioma patients during the recovery period. Moreover, we found that the BOLD signal within the tumour and lesioned brain was coupled with the global signal and that this coupling was associated with cognitive recovery. Nevertheless, patients did not show any apparent disruption of functional connectivity within canonical functional networks. Understanding how tumour infiltration and coupling are related to patients' recovery represents a major step forward in prognostic development.

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a type of brain disease which causes visual, sensory, and motor problems for people with a detrimental effect on the functioning of the nervous system. In order to diagnose MS, multiple screening methods have been proposed so far; among them, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has received considerable attention among physicians. MRI modalities provide physicians with fundamental information about the structure and function of the brain, which is crucial for the rapid diagnosis of MS lesions. Diagnosing MS using MRI is time-consuming, tedious, and prone to manual errors. Research on the implementation of computer aided diagnosis system (CADS) based on artificial intelligence (AI) to diagnose MS involves conventional machine learning and deep learning (DL) methods. In conventional machine learning, feature extraction, feature selection, and classification steps are carried out by using trial and error; on the contrary, these steps in DL are based on deep layers whose values are automatically learn. In this paper, a complete review of automated MS diagnosis methods performed using DL techniques with MRI neuroimaging modalities is provided. Initially, the steps involved in various CADS proposed using MRI modalities and DL techniques for MS diagnosis are investigated. The important preprocessing techniques employed in various works are analyzed. Most of the published papers on MS diagnosis using MRI modalities and DL are presented. The most significant challenges facing and future direction of automated diagnosis of MS using MRI modalities and DL techniques are also provided., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The first known case of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was identified in December 2019. It has spread worldwide, leading to an ongoing pandemic, imposed restrictions and costs to many countries. Predicting the number of new cases and deaths during this period can be a useful step in predicting the costs and facilities required in the future. The purpose of this study is to predict new cases and deaths rate one, three and seven-day ahead during the next 100 days. The motivation for predicting every n days (instead of just every day) is the investigation of the possibility of computational cost reduction and still achieving reasonable performance. Such a scenario may be encountered in real-time forecasting of time series. Six different deep learning methods are examined on the data adopted from the WHO website. Three methods are LSTM, Convolutional LSTM, and GRU. The bidirectional extension is then considered for each method to forecast the rate of new cases and new deaths in Australia and Iran countries. This study is novel as it carries out a comprehensive evaluation of the aforementioned three deep learning methods and their bidirectional extensions to perform prediction on COVID-19 new cases and new death rate time series. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that Bi-GRU and Bi-Conv-LSTM models are used for prediction on COVID-19 new cases and new deaths time series. The evaluation of the methods is presented in the form of graphs and Friedman statistical test. The results show that the bidirectional models have lower errors than other models. A several error evaluation metrics are presented to compare all models, and finally, the superiority of bidirectional methods is determined. This research could be useful for organisations working against COVID-19 and determining their long-term plans., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2021 The Authors.)

COVID-19 has caused many deaths worldwide. The automation of the diagnosis of this virus is highly desired. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown outstanding classification performance on image datasets. To date, it appears that COVID computer-aided diagnosis systems based on CNNs and clinical information have not yet been analysed or explored. We propose a novel method, named the CNN-AE, to predict the survival chance of COVID-19 patients using a CNN trained with clinical information. Notably, the required resources to prepare CT images are expensive and limited compared to those required to collect clinical data, such as blood pressure, liver disease, etc. We evaluated our method using a publicly available clinical dataset that we collected. The dataset properties were carefully analysed to extract important features and compute the correlations of features. A data augmentation procedure based on autoencoders (AEs) was proposed to balance the dataset. The experimental results revealed that the average accuracy of the CNN-AE (96.05%) was higher than that of the CNN (92.49%). To demonstrate the generality of our augmentation method, we trained some existing mortality risk prediction methods on our dataset (with and without data augmentation) and compared their performances. We also evaluated our method using another dataset for further generality verification. To show that clinical data can be used for COVID-19 survival chance prediction, the CNN-AE was compared with multiple pre-trained deep models that were tuned based on CT images., (© 2021. The Author(s).)

In this paper, a novel medical image encryption method based on multi-mode synchronization of hyper-chaotic systems is presented. The synchronization of hyper-chaotic systems is of great significance in secure communication tasks such as encryption of images. Multi-mode synchronization is a novel and highly complex issue, especially if there is uncertainty and disturbance. In this work, an adaptive-robust controller is designed for multimode synchronized chaotic systems with variable and unknown parameters, despite the bounded disturbance and uncertainty with a known function in two modes. In the first case, it is a main system with some response systems, and in the second case, it is a circular synchronization. Using theorems it is proved that the two synchronization methods are equivalent. Our results show that, we are able to obtain the convergence of synchronization error and parameter estimation error to zero using Lyapunov's method. The new laws to update time-varying parameters, estimating disturbance and uncertainty bounds are proposed such that stability of system is guaranteed. To assess the performance of the proposed synchronization method, various statistical analyzes were carried out on the encrypted medical images and standard benchmark images. The results show effective performance of the proposed synchronization technique in the medical images encryption for telemedicine application.

Multimodal fusion in neuroimaging combines data from multiple imaging modalities to overcome the fundamental limitations of individual modalities. Neuroimaging fusion can achieve higher temporal and spatial resolution, enhance contrast, correct imaging distortions, and bridge physiological and cognitive information. In this study, we analyzed over 450 references from PubMed, Google Scholar, IEEE, ScienceDirect, Web of Science, and various sources published from 1978 to 2020. We provide a review that encompasses (1) an overview of current challenges in multimodal fusion (2) the current medical applications of fusion for specific neurological diseases, (3) strengths and limitations of available imaging modalities, (4) fundamental fusion rules, (5) fusion quality assessment methods, and (6) the applications of fusion for atlas-based segmentation and quantification. Overall, multimodal fusion shows significant benefits in clinical diagnosis and neuroscience research. Widespread education and further research amongst engineers, researchers and clinicians will benefit the field of multimodal neuroimaging., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests., (© 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

(Aim) COVID-19 pandemic causes numerous death tolls till now. Chest CT is an effective imaging sensor system to make accurate diagnosis. (Method) This article proposed a novel seven layer convolutional neural network based smart diagnosis model for COVID-19 diagnosis (7L-CNN-CD). We proposed a 14-way data augmentation to enhance the training set, and introduced stochastic pooling to replace traditional pooling methods. (Results) The 10 runs of 10-fold cross validation experiment show that our 7L-CNN-CD approach achieves a sensitivity of 94.44±0.73, a specificity of 93.63±1.60, and an accuracy of 94.03±0.80. (Conclusion) Our proposed 7L-CNN-CD is effective in diagnosing COVID-19 in chest CT images. It gives better performance than several state-of-the-art algorithms. The data augmentation and stochastic pooling methods are proven to be effective.

The Temporal Sampling Framework (TSF) theorizes that the characteristic phonological difficulties of dyslexia are caused by an atypical oscillatory sampling at one or more temporal rates. The LEEDUCA study conducted a series of Electroencephalography (EEG) experiments on children listening to amplitude modulated (AM) noise with slow-rythmic prosodic (0.5-1[Formula: see text]Hz), syllabic (4-8[Formula: see text]Hz) or the phoneme (12-40[Formula: see text]Hz) rates, aimed at detecting differences in perception of oscillatory sampling that could be associated with dyslexia. The purpose of this work is to check whether these differences exist and how they are related to children's performance in different language and cognitive tasks commonly used to detect dyslexia. To this purpose, temporal and spectral inter-channel EEG connectivity was estimated, and a denoising autoencoder (DAE) was trained to learn a low-dimensional representation of the connectivity matrices. This representation was studied via correlation and classification analysis, which revealed ability in detecting dyslexic subjects with an accuracy higher than 0.8, and balanced accuracy around 0.7. Some features of the DAE representation were significantly correlated ([Formula: see text]) with children's performance in language and cognitive tasks of the phonological hypothesis category such as phonological awareness and rapid symbolic naming, as well as reading efficiency and reading comprehension. Finally, a deeper analysis of the adjacency matrix revealed a reduced bilateral connection between electrodes of the temporal lobe (roughly the primary auditory cortex) in DD subjects, as well as an increased connectivity of the F7 electrode, placed roughly on Broca's area. These results pave the way for a complementary assessment of dyslexia using more objective methodologies such as EEG.

Despite subjects with Dominantly-Inherited Alzheimer's Disease (DIAD) represent less than 1% of all Alzheimer's Disease (AD) cases, the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network (DIAN) initiative constitutes a strong impact in the understanding of AD disease course with special emphasis on the presyptomatic disease phase. Until now, the 3 genes involved in DIAD pathogenesis (PSEN1, PSEN2 and APP) have been commonly merged into one group (Mutation Carriers, MC) and studied using conventional statistical analysis. Comparisons between groups using null-hypothesis testing or longitudinal regression procedures, such as the linear-mixed-effects models, have been assessed in the extant literature. Within this context, the work presented here performs a comparison between different groups of subjects by considering the 3 genes, either jointly or separately, and using tools based on Machine Learning (ML). This involves a feature selection step which makes use of ANOVA followed by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to determine which features would be realiable for further comparison purposes. Then, the selected predictors are classified using a Support-Vector-Machine (SVM) in a nested k-Fold cross-validation resulting in maximum classification rates of 72-74% using PiB PET features, specially when comparing asymptomatic Non-Carriers (NC) subjects with asymptomatic PSEN1 Mutation-Carriers (PSEN1-MC). Results obtained from these experiments led to the idea that PSEN1-MC might be considered as a mixture of two different subgroups including: a first group whose patterns were very close to NC subjects, and a second group much more different in terms of imaging patterns. Thus, using a k-Means clustering algorithm it was determined both subgroups and a new classification scenario was conducted to validate this process. The comparison between each subgroup vs . NC subjects resulted in classification rates around 80% underscoring the importance of considering DIAN as an heterogeneous entity., Competing Interests: Conflict of interest statement The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Declaration of interest: All authors disclose any financial and personal relationships with other people or organizations that could inappropriately influence (bias) their work or state if there are no interests to declare. Prof. JM Gorriz

Many classical machine learning techniques have been used to explore Alzheimer's disease (AD), evolving from image decomposition techniques such as principal component analysis toward higher complexity, non-linear decomposition algorithms. With the arrival of the deep learning paradigm, it has become possible to extract high-level abstract features directly from MRI images that internally describe the distribution of data in low-dimensional manifolds. In this work, we try a new exploratory data analysis of AD based on deep convolutional autoencoders. We aim at finding links between cognitive symptoms and the underlying neurodegeneration process by fusing the information of neuropsychological test outcomes, diagnoses, and other clinical data with the imaging features extracted solely via a data-driven decomposition of MRI. The distribution of the extracted features in different combinations is then analyzed and visualized using regression and classification analysis, and the influence of each coordinate of the autoencoder manifold over the brain is estimated. The imaging-derived markers could then predict clinical variables with correlations above 0.6 in the case of neuropsychological evaluation variables such as the MMSE or the ADAS11 scores, achieving a classification accuracy over 80% for the diagnosis of AD.

Nonmass-enhancing (NME) lesions constitute a diagnostic challenge in dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) of the breast. Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems provide physicians with advanced tools for analysis, assessment, and evaluation that have a significant impact on the diagnostic performance. Here, we propose a new approach to address the challenge of NME lesion detection and segmentation, taking advantage of independent component analysis (ICA) to extract data-driven dynamic lesion characterizations. A set of independent sources was obtained from the DCE-MRI dataset of breast cancer patients, and the dynamic behavior of the different tissues was described by multiple dynamic curves, together with a set of eigenimages describing the scores for each voxel. A new test image is projected onto the independent source space using the unmixing matrix, and each voxel is classified by a support vector machine (SVM) that has already been trained with manually delineated data. A solution to the high false-positive rate problem is proposed by controlling the SVM hyperplane location, outperforming previously published approaches.

Background: The number of patients with Alzheimer's disease is increasing rapidly every year. Scholars often use computer vision and machine learning methods to develop an automatic diagnosis system., Objective: In this study, we developed a novel machine learning system that can make diagnoses automatically from brain magnetic resonance images., Methods: First, the brain imaging was processed, including skull stripping and spatial normalization. Second, one axial slice was selected from the volumetric image, and stationary wavelet entropy (SWE) was done to extract the texture features. Third, a single-hidden-layer neural network was used as the classifier. Finally, a predator-prey particle swarm optimization was proposed to train the weights and biases of the classifier., Results: Our method used 4-level decomposition and yielded 13 SWE features. The classification yielded an overall accuracy of 92.73±1.03%, a sensitivity of 92.69±1.29%, and a specificity of 92.78±1.51%. The area under the curve is 0.95±0.02. Additionally, this method only cost 0.88 s to identify a subject in online stage, after its volumetric image is preprocessed., Conclusion: In terms of classification performance, our method performs better than 10 state-of-the-art approaches and the performance of human observers. Therefore, this proposed method is effective in the detection of Alzheimer's disease.

Background: Feature extraction in medical image processing still remains a challenge, especially in high-dimensionality datasets, where the expected number of available samples is considerably lower than the dimension of the feature space. This is a common problem in real-world data, and, specifically, in medical image pro- cessing as, while images are composed of hundreds of thousands voxels, only a reduced number of patients are available., Objective: Extracting descriptive and discriminative features to represent each sample (image) by a small number of features, which is particularly important in classification task, due to the curse of dimensionality problem., Methods: In this paper we solve this recognition problem by means of sparse representations of the data, which also provides an arena to multimodal image (PET and MRI) data classification by combining specialized classifiers. Thus, a novel method to effectively combine SVC classifiers is presented here, which uses the distance to the hyperplane computed for each class in each classifier allowing to select the most discriminative image modality in each case. The discriminative power of each modality also provides information about the illness evolution; while functional changes are clearly found in Alzheimer's diagnosed patients (AD) when compared to control subjects (CN), structural changes seem to be more relevant at the early stages of the illness, affecting Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) patients., Results: Classification experiments using 68 CN, 70 AD and 111 MCI images from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative database have been performed and assessed by cross-validation to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. Accuracy values of up to 92% and 84% for CN/AD and CN/MCI classification are achieved., Conclusions: The method presented in this work shows that sparse representations of brain images are of importance for codifying and transferring relevant image features, as they may capture the salient features while maintaining lightweight data transactions. In fact, the method proposed in this work outperforms the classification results obtained using projection methods such as Principal Component Analysis for extracting representative features of the images., (Copyright© Bentham Science Publishers; For any queries, please email at epub@benthamscience.org.)

Highlights We develop computer-aided diagnosis system for unilateral hearing loss detection in structural magnetic resonance imaging.Wavelet entropy is introduced to extract image global features from brain images. Directed acyclic graph is employed to endow support vector machine an ability to handle multi-class problems.The developed computer-aided diagnosis system achieves an overall accuracy of 95.1% for this three-class problem of differentiating left-sided and right-sided hearing loss from healthy controls. Aim: Sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) is correlated to many neurodegenerative disease. Now more and more computer vision based methods are using to detect it in an automatic way. Materials: We have in total 49 subjects, scanned by 3.0T MRI (Siemens Medical Solutions, Erlangen, Germany). The subjects contain 14 patients with right-sided hearing loss (RHL), 15 patients with left-sided hearing loss (LHL), and 20 healthy controls (HC). Method: We treat this as a three-class classification problem: RHL, LHL, and HC. Wavelet entropy (WE) was selected from the magnetic resonance images of each subjects, and then submitted to a directed acyclic graph support vector machine (DAG-SVM). Results: The 10 repetition results of 10-fold cross validation shows 3-level decomposition will yield an overall accuracy of 95.10% for this three-class classification problem, higher than feedforward neural network, decision tree, and naive Bayesian classifier. Conclusions: This computer-aided diagnosis system is promising. We hope this study can attract more computer vision method for detecting hearing loss.

In this work, we present a fully automatic computer-aided diagnosis method for the early diagnosis of the Alzheimer's disease. We study the distance between classes (labelled as normal controls and possible Alzheimer's disease) calculated in 116 regions of the brain using the Welchs's t-test. We select the regions with highest Welchs's t-test value as features to perform classification. Furthermore, we also study the less discriminative region according to the t-test (regions with lowest t-test absolute values) in order to use them as reference. We show that the mean and standard deviation of the intensity values in these two regions, the less and most discriminative according to the Welch's ttest, can be combined as a vector. The modulus and phase of this vector reveal statistical differences between groups which can be used to improve the classification task. We show how they can be used as input for a support vector machine classifier. The proposed methodology is tested in a SPECT brain database of 70 SPECT brain images yielding an accuracy up to 91.5% for a wide range of selected voxels.

Purpose: An accurate and early diagnosis of Parkinsonian syndrome (PS) is nowadays a challenge. This syndrome includes several pathologies with similar symptoms (Parkinson's disease, multisystem atrophy, progressive supranuclear palsy, corticobasal degeneration and others) which make the diagnosis more difficult. (123)I-ioflupane allows to obtain in vivo images of the brain that can be used to assist the PS diagnosis and provides a way to improve its accuracy., Methods: In this paper, we show a novel method to automatically classify (123)I-ioflupane images into two groups: controls or PS. The proposed methodology analyzes separately each hemisphere of the brain by means of a novel approach based on partial least squares (PLS) and support vector machine., Results: A database with 189 (123)I-ioflupane images (94 controls and 95 pathological images) was used for evaluation purposes. The application of the proposed method based on PLS yields high accuracy rates up to 94.7% with sensitivity = 93.7% and specificity = 95.7%, outperforming previous approaches based on singular value decomposition, which are used as a reference., Conclusions: The use of advanced techniques based on classical signal analysis and their application to each hemisphere of the brain separately improves the (assisted) diagnosis of PS.

The region of the Bay of Algeciras is a very industrialized area where very few air pollution studies have been carried out. The main objective of this work has been the use of artificial neural networks (ANNs) as a predictive tool of high levels of ambient carbon monoxide (CO). Two approaches have been used: multilayer perceptron models (MLPs) with backpropagation learning rule and k-Nearest Neighbours (k-nn) classifiers, in order to predict future peaks of carbon monoxide. A resampling strategy with twofold cross-validation allowed the statistical comparison of the different topologies and models considered in the study. The procedure of random resampling permits an adequate and robust multiple comparisons of the tested models and allow us to select a group of best models.