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Healthcare is crucial to patient care because it provides vital services for maintaining and restoring health. As healthcare technology evolves, cutting-edge tools facilitate faster diagnosis and more effective patient treatment. In the present age of pandemics, the Internet of Things (IoT) offers a potential solution to the problem of patient safety monitoring by creating a massive quantity of data about the patient through the linked devices around them and then analyzing it to estimate the patient’s current status. Utilizing the IoT-based meta-heuristic algorithm allows patients to be remotely monitored, resulting in timely diagnosis and improved care. Meta-heuristic algorithms are successful, resilient, and effective in solving real-world enhancement, clustering, predicting, and grouping. Healthcare organizations need an efficient method for dealing with big data since the prevalence of such data makes it challenging to analyze for diagnosis. The current techniques used in medical diagnostics have limitations due to imbalanced data and the overfitting issue. This study introduces the particle swarm optimization and convolutional neural network to be used as a meta-heuristic optimization method for extensive data analysis in the IoT to monitor patients’ health conditions. Particle Swarm Optimization is used to optimize the data used in the study. Information for a diabetes diagnosis model that includes cardiac risk forecasting is collected. Particle Swarm Optimization and Convolutional Neural Networks (PSO-CNN) results effectively make illness predictions. Support Vector Machine has been used to predict the possibility of a heart attack based on the classification of the collected data into projected abnormal and normal ranges for diabetes. The results of the simulations reveal that the PSO-CNN model used to predict diabetic disease increased in accuracy by 92.6%, precision by 92.5%, recall by 93.2%, F1-score by 94.2%, and quantization error by 4.1%. The suggested approach could be applied to identify cancer cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Anaemia is a commonly known blood illness worldwide. Red blood cell (RBC) count or oxygen carrying capability being insufficient are two ways to describe anaemia. This disorder has an impact on the quality of life. If anaemia is detected in the initial stage, appropriate care can be taken to prevent further harm. OBJECTIVE: This study proposes a machine learning approach to identify anaemia from clinical markers, which will help further in clinical practice. METHODS: The models are designed with a dataset of 364 samples and 12 blood test attributes. The developed algorithm is expected to provide decision support to the clinicians based on blood markers. Each model is trained and validated on several performance metrics. RESULTS: The accuracy obtained by the random forest, K nearest neighbour, support vector machine, Naive Bayes, xgboost, and catboost are 97%, 98%, 95%, 95%, 98% and 97% respectively. Four explainers such as Shapley Additive Values (SHAP), QLattice, Eli5 and local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME) are explored for interpreting the model predictions. CONCLUSION: The study provides insights into the potential of machine learning algorithms for classification and may help in the development of automated and accurate diagnostic tools for anaemia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Fatty liver disease is a common condition caused by excess fat in the liver. It consists of two types: Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease, also called alcoholic steatohepatitis, and Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD). As per epidemiological studies, fatty liver encompasses 9% to 32% of the general population in India and affects overweight people. OBJECTIVE: An Optimized Support Vector Machine with Support Vector Regression model is proposed to evaluate the volume of liver fat by image analysis (LFA-OSVM-SVR). METHOD: The input computed tomography (CT) liver images are collected from the Chennai liver foundation and Liver Segmentation (LiTS) datasets. Here, input datasets are pre-processed using Gaussian smoothing filter and bypass filter to reduce noise and improve image intensity. The proposed U-Net method is used to perform the liver segmentation. The Optimized Support Vector Machine is used to classify the liver images as fatty liver image and normal images. The support vector regression (SVR) is utilized for analyzing the fat in percentage. RESULTS: The LFA-OSVM-SVR model effectively analyzed the liver fat from CT scan images. The proposed approach is activated in python and its efficiency is analyzed under certain performance metrics. CONCLUSION: The proposed LFA-OSVM-SVR method attains 33.4%, 28.3%, 25.7% improved accuracy with 55%, 47.7%, 32.6% lower error rate for fatty image classification and 30%, 21%, 19.5% improved accuracy with 57.9%, 46.5%, 31.76% lower error rate for normal image classificationthan compared to existing methods such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Fractional Differential Enhancement (FDE) (CNN-FDE), Fully Convolutional Networks (FCN) and Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) (FCN-NMF), and Deep Learning with Fully Convolutional Networks (FCN) (DL-FCN). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Cervical histopathology image classification is a crucial indicator in cervical biopsy results. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study is to identify histopathology images of cervical cancer at an early stage by extracting texture and morphological features for the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. METHODS: We extract three different texture features and one morphological feature of cervical histopathology images: first-order histogram, K-means clustering, Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) and nucleus feature. The original dataset used in our experiment is obtained from 20 patients diagnosed with cervical cancer, including 135 whole slide images (WSIs). Given an entire WSI, the patches on its tissue region are extracted randomly. RESULTS: We finally obtain 3,000 patches, including 1,000 normal, 1,000 hysteromyoma and 1,000 cancer images. Among them, 80% of the entire data set is randomly selected as training set and the remaining 20% as test set. The accuracy of SVM classification using first-order histogram, K-means clustering, GLAM and nucleus feature for extracting features are respectively 87.4%, 90.6%, 91.6% and 93.5%. CONCLUSIONS: The classification accuracy of the SVM combining the four features is 96.8%, and the proposed nucleus feature plays a key role in the SVM classification of cervical histopathology images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Periodontitis is a common oral immune inflammatory disease and early detection plays an important role in its prevention and progression. However, there are no accurate biomarkers for early diagnosis. OBJECTIVE: This study screened periodontitis-related diagnostic biomarkers based on weighted gene correlation network analysis and machine algorithms. METHODS: Transcriptome data and sample information of periodontitis and normal samples were obtained from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database, and key genes of disease-related modules were obtained by bioinformatics. The key genes were subjected to Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment analysis, Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) enrichment analysis and 5 machine algorithms: Logistic Regression (LR), Random Forest (RF), Gradient Boosting Decisio Tree (GBDT), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and Support Vector Machine (SVM). Expression and correlation analysis were performed after screening the optimal model and diagnostic biomarkers. RESULTS: A total of 47 candidate genes were obtained, and the LR model had the best diagnostic efficiency. The COL15A1, ICAM2, SLC15A2, and PIP5K1B were diagnostic biomarkers for periodontitis, and all of which were upregulated in periodontitis samples. In addition, the high expression of periodontitis biomarkers promotes positive function with immune cells. CONCLUSION: COL15A1, ICAM2, SLC15A2 and PIP5K1B are potential diagnostic biomarkers of periodontitis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Age is an essential feature of people, so the study of facial aging should have particular significance.Objective: The purpose of this study is to improve the performance of age prediction by combining facial landmarks and texture features.Methods: We first measure the distribution of each texture feature. From a geometric point of view, facial feature points will change with age, so it is essential to study facial feature points. We annotate the facial feature points, label the corresponding feature point coordinates, and then use the coordinates of feature points and texture features to predict the age.Results: We use the Support Vector Machine regression prediction method to predict the age based on the extracted texture features and landmarks. Compared with facial texture features, the prediction results based on facial landmarks are better. This suggests that the facial morphological features contained in facial landmarks can reflect facial age better than facial texture features. Combined with facial landmarks and texture features, the performance of age prediction can be improved.Conclusions: According to the experimental results, we can conclude that texture features combined with facial landmarks are useful for age prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Applied research on artificial intelligence, mainly in deep learning, is widely performed. If medical images can be evaluated using artificial intelligence, this could substantially improve examination efficiency.Objective: We investigated an evaluation system for medical images with different noise characteristics using a deep convolutional neural network.Methods: Simulated computed tomography images are the targets of the system. We used an AlexNet trained with natural images for the deep convolutional neural network and a support vector machine for classification. Synthetic computed tomography images with circular and rectangular signal bodies at different levels of contrast and added Gaussian noise were used for training and testing.Results: Two transfer learning methods were tested: classification by a re-trained support vector machine using the AlexNet features, and a method that fine-tuned the deep convolutional neural network. Using the first method, all the test image noise levels could be classified correctly. The fine-tuning method achieved an accuracy rate of 92.6%.Conclusions: An image quality evaluation method using artificial intelligence will be useful for clinical images and different image quality indices in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Facial expression recognition plays an essential role in affective computing, mental illness diagnosis and rehabilitation. Therefore, facial expression recognition has attracted more and more attention over the years.Objective: The goal of this paper was to improve the accuracy of the Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based facial expression recognition.Methods: In this paper, we proposed a fusion facial expression recognition method based on EEG and facial landmark localization. The EEG signal processing and facial landmark localization are the two key parts. The raw EEG signals is preprocessed by discrete wavelet transform (DWT). The energy feature vector is composed of energy features of the reconstructed signal. For facial landmark localization, images of the subjects' facial expression are processed by facial landmark localization, and the facial features are calculated by landmarks of essence. In this research, we fused the energy feature vector and facial feature vector, and classified the fusion feature vector with the support vector machine (SVM).Results: From the experiments, we found that the accuracy of facial expression recognition was increased 4.16% by fusion method (86.94 ± 4.35%) than EEG-based facial expression recognition (82.78 ± 5.78%).Conclusion: The proposed method obtain a higher accuracy and a stronger generalization capability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The current method to evaluate major depressive disorder (MDD) relies on subjective clinical interviews and self-questionnaires.Objective: Autonomic imbalance in MDD patients is characterized using entropy measures of heart rate variability (HRV). A machine learning approach for screening depression based on the entropy is demonstrated.Methods: The participants experience five experimental phases: baseline (BASE), stress task (MAT), stress task recovery (REC1), relaxation task (RLX), and relaxation task recovery (REC2). The four entropy indices, approximate entropy, sample entropy, fuzzy entropy, and Shannon entropy, are extracted for each phase, and a total of 20 features are used. A support vector machine classifier and recursive feature elimination are employed for classification.Results: The entropy features are lower in the MDD group; however, the disease does not have a significant effect. Experimental tasks significantly affect the features. The entropy did not recover during REC1. The differences in the entropy features between the two groups increased after MAT and showed the largest gap in REC2. We achieved 70% accuracy, 64% sensitivity, and 76% specificity with three optimal features during RLX and REC2.Conclusion: Monitoring of HRV complexity changes when a subject experiences autonomic arousal and recovery can potentially facilitate objective depression recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the practical implementation of control of electromyography (sEMG) driven devices, algorithms should recognize the human's motion from sEMG with fast speed and high accuracy. This study proposes two feature engineering (FE) techniques, namely, feature-vector resampling and time-lag techniques, to improve the accuracy and speed of least square support vector machine (LSSVM) for wrist palmar angle estimation from sEMG feature. The root mean square error and correlation coefficients of LSSVM with FE are 9.50 ± 2.32 degree and 0.971 ± 0.018 respectively. The average training time and average execution time of LSSVM with FE in processing 12600 sEMG points are 0.016 s and 0.053 s respectively. To evaluate the proposed algorithm, its estimation results are compared with those of three other methods, namely, LSSVM, radial basis function (RBF) neural network, and RBF with FE. Experimental results verify that introduction of time-lag into feature vector can greatly improve the estimation accuracy of both RBF and LSSVM; meanwhile the application of feature-vector resampling technique can significantly increase the training and execution speed of RBF neural network and LSSVM. Among different algorithms applied in this study, LSSVM with FE techniques performed best in terms of training and execution speed, as well as estimation accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Heart rate variability (HRV) can reflect the relationship between heart rhythm and sleep structure.Objective: In order to study the effect of support vector machine (SVM) on the results of automatic sleep staging and improve the effectiveness of heart rate variability (HRV) as a sleep structure biomarker, thereby realize long term and non-contact monitoring of sleep quality.Methods: Two kinds of parameter optimization methods are applied to stage sleep experiments when the known SVM can be used for automatic sleep staging. By factor analysis of the time domain, frequency domain, and nonlinear dynamic characteristics of subjects' HRV signals, the accuracy of the cross-validation method (K-CV) is used as the fitness function value in genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO). Furthermore, GA and PSO are used to optimize the SVM parameters.Results: The results show that the accuracy rate of sleep stage is 64.44% when parameters are not optimized, the accuracy rate based on PSO is improved to 78.89% and the accuracy rate based on GA is improved to 84.44%.Conclusion: Both optimization algorithms can improve the accuracy of SVM for sleep staging and better results based on GA in the experiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Prosthetists conventionally evaluate alignment based on visual interpretation of patients' gait, which is convenient, but largely subjective and depends on prosthetists' experience.Objective: In this paper, we explore the feasibility of using a support vector machine (SVM) approach to automatically detect misalignment of trans-tibial prostheses through ground reaction force (GRF).Methods: Alternate classification algorithms with varying kernels and feature sets were compared to assess the suitability for detection of a representative misalignment (six degrees of ankle plantar flexion) from normal alignment. A classical feature selection algorithm, Fisher Score, was further introduced to identify valuable features and reduce the dimension of feature sets.Results: The SVMs achieved a detection accuracy of 96.67% at best within the same subject and 88.89%, respectively, for inter-subject. Combined horizontal and vertical components of GRF features provided the maximum detection accuracies. Propulsion peak force was identified as key variable of gait for misalignment prediction.Conclusions: As a proof of concept, the results demonstrate potential in applying this approach to detect prosthetic misalignment based on gait patterns, and is a step towards future developments of tools for early prevention of misalignment in clinical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: P300-spellers are brain-computer interface (BCI)-based character input systems. Support vector machine (SVM) ensembles are trained with large-scale training sets and used as classifiers in these systems. However, the required large-scale training data necessitate a prolonged collection time for each subject, which results in data collected toward the end of the period being contaminated by the subject's fatigue.Objective: This study aimed to develop a method for acquiring more training data based on a collected small training set.Methods: A new method was developed in which two corresponding training datasets in two sequences are superposed and averaged to extend the training set. The proposed method was tested offline on a P300-speller with the familiar face paradigm.Results: The SVM ensemble with extended training set achieved 85% classification accuracy for the averaged results of four sequences, and 100% for 11 sequences in the P300-speller. In contrast, the conventional SVM ensemble with non-extended training set achieved only 65% accuracy for four sequences, and 92% for 11 sequences.Conclusion: The SVM ensemble with extended training set achieves higher classification accuracies than the conventional SVM ensemble, which verifies that the proposed method effectively improves the classification performance of BCI P300-spellers, thus enhancing their practicality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Human emotion classification is traditionally achieved using multi-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) signal, which requires costly equipment and complex classification algorithms.Objective: The experiments can be implemented in the laboratory environment equipped with high-performance computers for the online analysis; this will hinder the usability in practical applications.Methods: Considering that other physiological signals are also associated with emotional changes, this paper proposes to use a wearable, wireless system to acquire a single-channel electroencephalogram signal, respiration, electrocardiogram (ECG) signal, and body postures to explore the relationship between these signals and the human emotions.Results and Conclusions: Compared with traditional emotion classification method, the presented method was able to extract a small number of key features associated with human emotions from multiple physiological signals, where the algorithm complexity was greatly reduced when incorporated with the support vector machine classification. The proposed method can support an embedded on-line analysis and may enhance the usability of emotion classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Mammography is considered the gold standard for early breast cancer detection but it is very difficult to interpret mammograms for many reason. Computer aided diagnosis (CAD) is an important development that may help to improve the performance in breast cancer detection.Objective: We present a CAD system based on feature extraction techniques for detecting abnormal patterns in digital mammograms.Methods: Computed features based on gray-level co-occurrence matrices (GLCM) are used to evaluate the effectiveness of textural information possessed by mass regions. A total of 20 texture features are extracted from each mammogram. The ability of feature set in differentiating normal, benign and malign tissue is investigated using a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, Naive Bayes classifier and K-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) classifier. The efficiency of classification is provided using cross-validation technique. Support Vector Machine was originally designed for binary classification. We constructed a three-class SVM classifier by combining two binary classifiers and then compared his performance with classifiers intended for multi-class classification. To evaluate the classification performance, confusion matrix and Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis were performed.Results: Obtained results indicate that SVM classification results are better than the k-NN and Naive Bayes classification results, with accuracy ratio of 65% according to 51.6% and 38.1%, respectively.The unbalanced classification that occurs in all three classification tests is reason for unsatisfactory accuracy.Conclusions: Obtained experimental results indicate that the proposed three-class SVM classifier is more suitable for practical use than the other two methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Detection of clustered microcalcification (MC) from mammograms plays essential roles in computer-aided diagnosis for early stage breast cancer.Objective: To tackle problems associated with the diversity of data structures of MC lesions and the variability of normal breast tissues, multi-pattern sample space learning is required.Methods: In this paper, a novel grouped fuzzy Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm with sample space partition based on Expectation-Maximization (EM) (called G-FSVM) is proposed for clustered MC detection. The diversified pattern of training data is partitioned into several groups based on EM algorithm. Then a series of fuzzy SVM are integrated for classification with each group of samples from the MC lesions and normal breast tissues.Results: From DDSM database, a total of 1,064 suspicious regions are selected from 239 mammography, and the measurement of Accuracy, True Positive Rate (TPR), False Positive Rate (FPR) and EVL = TPR* 1-FPR are 0.82, 0.78, 0.14 and 0.72, respectively.Conclusion: The proposed method incorporates the merits of fuzzy SVM and multi-pattern sample space learning, decomposing the MC detection problem into serial simple two-class classification. Experimental results from synthetic data and DDSM database demonstrate that our integrated classification framework reduces the false positive rate significantly while maintaining the true positive rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is important to detect abnormal brains accurately and early. The wavelet-energy (WE) was a successful feature descriptor that achieved excellent performance in various applications; hence, we proposed a WE based new approach for automated abnormal detection, and reported its preliminary results in this study. The kernel support vector machine (KSVM) was used as the classifier, and quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization (QPSO) was introduced to optimize the weights of the SVM. The results based on a 5 × 5-fold cross validation showed the performance of the proposed WE + QPSO-KSVM was superior to ``DWT + PCA + BP-NN'', ``DWT + PCA + RBF-NN'', ``DWT + PCA + PSO-KSVM'', ``WE + BPNN'', ``WE +$ KSVM'', and ``DWT $+$ PCA $+$ GA-KSVM'' w.r.t. sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy. The work provides a novel means to detect abnormal brains with excellent performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a method for classifying electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings with images as stimulation is introduced, which aims at selecting the target images. EEG recordings to be processed are referred to the onset of the test images with a single stimulation so as to avoid spending extra time on repeating images. Independent component analysis (ICA) is used to reduce the redundancy of EEG recordings, and wavelet packet (WP) analysis is efficient for dealing with the non-stationary character of brain activity. Feature vectors are extracted by a method that combines these two algorithms. The support vector machine is used as a classifier, carrying out the classification result. The experimental results demonstrate that the accuracy of this method's image classification is affected very little by different classifier parameters. The best result achieves 90% accuracy, which indicts it is feasible for classifying images with a single stimulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Epileptic onsets often affect the autonomic function of the body during a seizure, whether it is in ictal, interictal or post-ictal periods. The different effects of localization and lateralization of seizures on heart rate variability (HRV) emphasize the importance of autonomic function changes in epileptic patients. On the other hand, the detection of seizures is of primary interests in evaluating the epileptic patients. In the current paper, we analyzed the HRV signal to develop a reliable offline seizure-detection algorithm to focus on the effects of lateralization on HRV.Materials and Methods: We assessed the HRV during 5-min segments of continuous electrocardiogram (ECG) recording with a total number of 170 seizures occurred in 16 patients, composed of 86 left-sided and 84 right-sided focus seizures. Relatively high and low-frequency components of the HRV were computed using spectral analysis. Poincaré parameters of each heart rate time series considered as non-linear features. We fed these features to the Support Vector Machines (SVMs) to find a robust classification method to classify epileptic and non-epileptic signals. Leave One Out Cross-Validation (LOOCV) approach was used to demonstrate the consistency of the classification results.Results: Our obtained classification accuracy confirms that the proposed scheme has a potential in classifying HRV signals to epileptic and non-epileptic classes. The accuracy rates for right-sided and left-sided focus seizures were obtained as 86.74% and 79.41%, respectively.Conclusions: The main finding of our study is that the patients with right-sided focus epilepsy showed more reduction in parasympathetic activity and more increase in sympathetic activity. It can be a marker of impaired vagal activity associated with increased cardiovascular risk and arrhythmias. Our results suggest that lateralization of the seizure onset zone could exert different influences on heart rate changes. A right-sided seizure would cause an ictal tachycardia whereas a left-sided seizure would result in an ictal bradycardia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: The size of medical datasets is usually very large, which directly affects the computational cost of the data mining process. Instance selection is a data preprocessing step in the knowledge discovery process, which can be employed to reduce storage requirements while also maintaining the mining quality. This process aims to filter out outliers (or noisy data) from a given (training) dataset. However, when the dataset is very large in size, more time is required to accomplish the instance selection task. OBJECTIVE: In this paper, we introduce an efficient data preprocessing approach (EDP), which is composed of two steps. The first step is based on training a model over a small amount of training data after preforming instance selection. The model is then used to identify the rest of the large amount of training data. METHODS: Experiments are conducted based on two medical datasets for breast cancer and protein homology prediction problems that contain over 100000 data samples. In addition, three well-known instance selection algorithms are used, IB3, DROP3, and genetic algorithms. On the other hand, three popular classification techniques are used to construct the learning models for comparison, namely the CART decision tree, k-nearest neighbor (k-NN), and support vector machine (SVM). RESULTS: The results show that our proposed approach not only reduces the computational cost by nearly a factor of two or three over three other state-of-the-art algorithms, but also maintains the final classification accuracy. CONCLUSIONS: To perform instance selection over large scale medical datasets, it requires a large computational cost to directly execute existing instance selection algorithms. Our proposed EDP approach solves this problem by training a learning model to recognize good and noisy data. To consider both computational complexity and final classification accuracy, the proposed EDP has been demonstrated its efficiency and effectiveness in the large scale instance selection problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In recent times there has been a significant change in lifestyle in many parts of the world, with most people experiencing a more sedentary existence combined with an abundance of food. This has resulted in the modern epidemic of obesity and consequent hyperinsulinemia - situations which in women may precipitate expression of fertility problems; effective methods to evaluate the fertility status are required. Ultrasonographic imaging is an effective, easy to use, safe, and readily available noninvasive means to evaluate fertility potential.Objective: Manual recognition of the follicles in terms of area measurement and counting the number of follicles is laborious; often fatigue may lead to error-prone conclusions. The paper attempts an automated classification of the ovaries based on the biomarking done by the physician. Also, biomarked data correlates with the hormones values such as androgen, testosterone and leutinizing hormone.Methods: Despeckled images are segmented by improved active contour with split-Bregman optimization. The features are extracted from images using geometric and intensity method. The significant features selected by particle swarm optimization and dimension reduction by principal component analysis and classification by probabilistic neural network.Results: Proposed probabilistic neural network achieves maximum efficiency of 97% compared to SVM 92% and RBF 88%.Conclusions: The results obtained show that using a very large number of features combined with a feature selection approach allows us to achieve high classification rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microcalcification clusters appear as groups of small, bright particles with arbitrary shapes on mammographic images. They are the earliest sign of breast carcinomas and their detection is the key for improving breast cancer prognosis. But due to the low contrast of microcalcifications and same properties as noise, it is difficult to detect microcalcification. This work is devoted to developing a system for the detection of microcalcification in digital mammograms. After removing noise from mammogram using the Discrete Wavelet Transformation (DWT), we first selected the region of interest (ROI) in order to demarcate the breast region on a mammogram. Segmenting region of interest represents one of the most important stages of mammogram processing procedure. The proposed segmentation method is based on a filtering using the Sobel filter. This process will identify the significant pixels, that belong to edges of microcalcifications. Microcalcifications were detected by increasing the contrast of the images obtained by applying Sobel operator. In order to confirm the effectiveness of this microcalcification segmentation method, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) and k-Nearest Neighborhood (k-NN) algorithm are employed for the classification task using cross-validation technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Coronary artery disease due to atherosclerosis is an epidemic in India. An estimated 1.3 million Indians died from this in 2000. The projected death from coronary artery disease by 2016 is 2.98 million.OBJECTIVE: To build an effective model which assorts the individuals, whether they belong to the normal group, risk group and pathologic group regarding atherosclerosis in real time by doing necessary preprocessing techniques and to compare the performance with other state-of-the-art machine learning techniques. METHODS: In this work we have employed STULONG dataset. We have made a deep case study in selecting the attributes which contributes for higher accuracy in predicting the target. The selected attributes includes missing values. Initially our work includes imputation of missing values using Iterative Principal Component Analysis (IPCA). The second step includes selecting best features using Fast Correlation Based Filter (FCBF). Finally the classifier Multiclass Support Vector Machine (SVM) with kernel Radial Basis Function (RBF) is used for classification of atherosclerotic community. RESULTS: For the subjects belonging to the classes of normal, risk and pathologic, our methodology has outperformed with an accuracy of 99.85%, 99.80% and 99.46% respectively. CONCLUSION: The combined optimization methods such as Iterative Principal Component Analysis (IPCA) for missing value imputation, Multiclass SVM for classifying normal, risk and pathologic community in real time has performed with overall accuracy of about 98.97%. The essential pre-processing technique, Fast Correlation Based Filter (FCBF) was employed to further intensifying the target. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Now-a-days, some new classes of diseases have come into existences which are known as lifestyle diseases. The main reasons behind these diseases are changes in the lifestyle of people such as alcohol drinking, smoking, food habits etc. After going through the various lifestyle diseases, it has been found that the fertility rates (sperm quantity) in men has considerably been decreasing in last two decades. Lifestyle factors as well as environmental factors are mainly responsible for the change in the semen quality. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this paper is to identify the lifestyle and environmental features that affects the seminal quality and also fertility rate in man using data mining methods. METHOD: The five artificial intelligence techniques such as Multilayer perceptron (MLP), Decision Tree (DT), Navie Bayes (Kernel), Support vector machine+Particle swarm optimization (SVM+PSO) and Support vector machine (SVM) have been applied on fertility dataset to evaluate the seminal quality and also to predict the person is either normal or having altered fertility rate. While the eight feature selection techniques such as support vector machine (SVM), neural network (NN), evolutionary logistic regression (LR), support vector machine plus particle swarm optimization (SVM+PSO), principle component analysis (PCA), chi-square test, correlation and T-test methods have been used to identify more relevant features which affect the seminal quality. These techniques are applied on fertility dataset which contains 100 instances with nine attribute with two classes. RESULTS: The experimental result shows that SVM+PSO provides higher accuracy and area under curve (AUC) rate (94% & 0.932) among multi-layer perceptron (MLP) (92% & 0.728), Support Vector Machines (91% & 0.758), Navie Bayes (Kernel) (89% & 0.850) and Decision Tree (89% & 0.735) for some of the seminal parameters. This paper also focuses on the feature selection process i.e. how to select the features which are more important for prediction of fertility rate. In this paper, eight feature selection methods are applied on fertility dataset to find out a set of good features. The investigational results shows that childish diseases (0.079) and high fever features (0.057) has less impact on fertility rate while age (0.8685), season (0.843), surgical intervention (0.7683), alcohol consumption (0.5992), smoking habit (0.575), number of hours spent on setting (0.4366) and accident (0.5973) features have more impact. It is also observed that feature selection methods increase the accuracy of above mentioned techniques (multilayer perceptron 92%, support vector machine 91%, SVM+PSO 94%, Navie Bayes (Kernel) 89% and decision tree 89%) as compared to without feature selection methods (multilayer perceptron 86%, support vector machine 86%, SVM+PSO 85%, Navie Bayes (Kernel) 83% and decision tree 84%) which shows the applicability of feature selection methods in prediction. CONCLUSION: This paper lightens the application of artificial techniques in medical domain. From this paper, it can be concluded that data mining methods can be used to predict a person with or without disease based on environmental and lifestyle parameters/features rather than undergoing various medical test. In this paper, five data mining techniques are used to predict the fertility rate and among which SVM+PSO provide more accurate results than support vector machine and decision tree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Volumes of medical images are rapidly generated in medical field and to manage them effectively has become a great challenge. This paper studies the development of innovative medical image retrieval based on texture features and accuracy. OBJECTIVE: The objective of the paper is to analyze the image retrieval based on diagnosis of healthcare management systems. METHODS: This paper traces the development of innovative medical image retrieval to estimate both the image texture features and accuracy. The texture features of medical images are extracted using MDCT and multi SVM. Both the theoretical approach and the simulation results revealed interesting observations and they were corroborated using MDCT coefficients and SVM methodology. RESULTS: All attempts to extract the data about the image in response to the query has been computed successfully and perfect image retrieval performance has been obtained. Experimental results on a database of 100 trademark medical images show that an integrated texture feature representation results in 98% of the images being retrieved using MDCT and multi SVM.CONCLUSION: Thus we have studied a multiclassification technique based on SVM which is prior suitable for medical images. The results show the retrieval accuracy of 98%, 99% for different sets of medical images with respect to the class of image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Diagnosing different types of liver diseases clinically is a quite hectic process because patients have to undergo large numbers of independent laboratory tests. On the basis of results and analysis of laboratory test, different liver diseases are classified. Hence to simplify this complex process, we have developed a Rule Base Classification Model (RBCM) to predict different types of liver diseases. The proposed model is the combination of rules and different data mining techniques.OBJECTIVE: The objective of this paper is to propose a rule based classification model with machine learning techniques for the prediction of different types of Liver diseases.METHOD: A dataset was developed with twelve attributes that include the records of 583 patients in which 441 patients were male and rests were female. Support Vector Machine (SVM), Rule Induction (RI), Decision Tree (DT), Naive Bayes (NB) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) data mining techniques with K-cross fold technique are used with the proposed model for the prediction of liver diseases. The performance of these data mining techniques are evaluated with accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and kappa parameters as well as statistical techniques (ANOVA and Chi square test) are used to analyze the liver disease dataset and independence of attributes.RESULT: Out of 583 patients, 416 patients are liver diseases affected and rests of 167 patients are healthy. The proposed model with decision tree (DT) technique provides the better result among all techniques (RI, SVM, ANN and NB) with all parameters (Accuracy 98.46%, Sensitivity 95.7%, Specificity 95.28% and Kappa 0.983) while the SVM exhibits poor performance (Accuracy 82.33%, Sensitivity 68.03%, Specificity 91.28% and Kappa 0.801). It is also found that the best performance of the model without rules (RI, Accuracy 82.68%, Sensitivity 86.34%, Specificity 90.51% and Kappa 0.619) is almost similar to the worst performance of the rule based classification model (SVM, Accuracy 82.33%, Sensitivity 68.03%, Specificity 91.28% and Kappa 0.801 and the accuracy of chi square test is 76.67%.CONCLUSION: This study demonstrates that there is a significant difference between the proposed rules based classification model and the model without rules for the liver diseases prediction and the rule based classification model with decision tree (DT) technique provides most accurate result. This model can be used as a valuable tool for medical decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: The goal of this work is to develop intelligent systems to monitor the wellbeing of individuals in their home environments.OBJECTIVE: This paper introduces a machine learning-based method to automatically predict activity quality in smart homes and automatically assess cognitive health based on activity quality. METHODS: This paper describes an automated framework to extract set of features from smart home sensors data that reflects the activity performance or ability of an individual to complete an activity which can be input to machine learning algorithms. Output from learning algorithms including principal component analysis, support vector machine, and logistic regression algorithms are used to quantify activity quality for a complex set of smart home activities and predict cognitive health of participants. RESULTS: Smart home activity data was gathered from volunteer participants (n=263) who performed a complex set of activities in our smart home testbed. We compare our automated activity quality prediction and cognitive health prediction with direct observation scores and health assessment obtained from neuropsychologists. With all samples included, we obtained statistically significant correlation (r=0.54) between direct observation scores and predicted activity quality. Similarly, using a support vector machine classifier, we obtained reasonable classification accuracy (area under the ROC curve=0.80, g-mean=0.73) in classifying participants into two different cognitive classes, dementia and cognitive healthy. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that it is possible to automatically quantify the task quality of smart home activities and perform limited assessment of the cognitive health of individual if smart home activities are properly chosen and learning algorithms are appropriately trained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Competence in performing endoscopy requires a considerable amount of hands-on practice for a physician to master. In an effort to reduce the involvement of patients in the training process, simulation has become an important part of endoscopic training. This paper presents a low-cost training and evaluation system for upper endoscopy that serves as an additional or alternative tool, particularly for entry-level gastroenterology fellows. The protocol of making a customized mechanical training model that provides realistic visual appearances of the upper GI tract was created. The materials and methods used in the fabrication are outlined step-by-step in this report. A software application associated with the mechanical model was also developed to provide help for trainee during practice, evaluate the performance automatically upon completion of the training tasks, and record the performance and results in a database for review or further analysis by the trainee or instructor. Our software provides trainee with an interactive training experience. A survey obtained from sixteen gastroenterologists shows a promising feasibility of using the developed system. The developed low-cost upper endoscopy simulator can provide both training and evaluation functions with substantially low investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]