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The neuronal activity has a unique genetic signature that can be used for personal identification and authentication. Continuous authentication of individuals is required in the field involving high security, such as military services, intelligence organizations and secret agencies. Electroencephalogram (EEG) based authentication method is favorable due to its uniqueness and the fact that it can be used even when the person is unconscious. In this study, we investigated the number of samples per subject required to reliably develop a biometric trait authentication system. Initially, we extracted the background EEG signals from the publicly available Temple University Hospital (TUH) database. A total of 46 statistical and frequency domain features were extracted from each EEG signal per subject. The classification was performed using the extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) classifier. We varied the number of EEG signal segments per subject from 5 to 127 with an increment of 5 segments per trial. Finally, the performance parameters such as accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision and F-measure were obtained in each case for the biometric authentication system using the test data. Our model achieved the highest accuracy of 100% when more than 75 EEG signals per subject were considered for the analysis. We also identified alpha band power as the most efficient feature for authentication. Our results show that EEG signals can be effectively used for personal identification and authentication.

Emotions are mental states that result from neurophysiological changes associated with thoughts, feelings, and behavioral responses. Emotions lead to modifications in heart rate variability, which can be identified through electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. In this study, we attempted to analyze the ECG signals to detect categorical emotions using time-domain features and machine-learning algorithms. Initially, the ECG signals of 30 subjects were obtained from the publicly available continuously annotated signals of emotion dataset. Further, the signals were preprocessed and extracted 32-time domain features from ECG signals which were recorded during different emotional states such as amusing, boring, relaxing, and scary. The extracted features were fed to a random forest (RF) classifier to rank the features and to build the three machine learning models such as logistic regression (LR), support vector machine, and RF. We achieved the highest average classification accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, and f1-score of 71.04%, 42.08%, 80.69%, 43.03%, and 42.32%, respectively, with the top 4 features using the LR classifier. We found that the mean of peaks, slope sign change, dynamic range, and mean of first derivative were ranked top and played a significant role in the classification model. Our study shows the effectiveness of utilizing ECG signals for emotion detection in wearable devices.

Differentially Expressed Genes (DEGs) are treated as candidate biomarkers, and a small set of DEGs might be identified as biomarkers using either biological knowledge or data-driven approaches like machine learning and statistical analysis. In this study, we used a combination of the machine learning algorithm and statistical tests to identify the top 300 genes that are differentially expressed in ASD compared to Typically Developed (TD). Initially, we extracted microarray gene expression data of 15 ASD and 15 TD from NCBI GEO database and used a standard pipeline to preprocess the data. Further, Random Forest (RF) was used to discriminate genes between ASD and TD. We, then analyzed the upregulated and downregulated genes using the logFC value to gain insights into their potential roles in the development of ASD. We further used drug-gene interaction analysis from ConnectivityMap to identify drugs that can inhibit the expression of these genes. Our results show that the proposed RF model yields average 5-fold cross-validation accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of 96.67%. Further, we obtained precision and F-measure scores of 97.5% and 96.57%, respectively. Our analysis identified several novel genes that are dysregulated in ASD, including genes (such as proliferation-inducing protein 38 and germinal centre expressed transcript 32) involved in synaptic transmission, neural development, and immune function. We also identified several drugs (such as ATPase_Inhibitor, kinase inhibitors, and histone deacetylase inhibitors) that can potentially be used to treat ASD. Our findings provide new insights into the molecular mechanisms of ASD and suggest potential targets for drug development. These findings may lead to new therapeutic approaches for the treatment of ASD.

In clinical and scientific research on emotion recognition using physiological signals, selecting the appropriate segment is of utmost importance for enhanced results. In our study, we optimized the electrodermal activity (EDA) segment for an emotion recognition system. Initially, we obtained EDA signals from two publicly available datasets: the Continuously annotated signals of emotion (CASE) and Wearable stress and affect detection (WESAD) for 4-class dimensional and three-class categorical emotional classification, respectively. These signals were pre-processed, and decomposed into phasic signals using the 'convex optimization to EDA' method. Further, the phasic signals were segmented into two equal parts, each subsequently segmented into five nonoverlapping windows. Spectrograms were then generated using short-time Fourier transform and Mel-frequency cepstrum for each window, from which we extracted 85 features. We built four machine learning models for the first part, second part, and whole phasic signals to investigate their performance in emotion recognition. In the CASE dataset, we achieved the highest multi-class accuracy of 62.54% using the whole phasic and 61.75% with the second part phasic signals. Conversely, the WESAD dataset demonstrated superior performance in three-class emotions classification, attaining an accuracy of 96.44% for both whole phasic and second part phasic segments. As a result, the second part of EDA is strongly recommended for optimal outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a highly heterogeneous condition, due to high variance in its etiology, comorbidity, pathogenesis, severity, genetics, and brain functional connectivity (FC). This makes it devoid of any robust universal biomarker. This study aims to analyze the role of age and multivariate patterns in brain FC and their accountability in diagnosing ASD by deep learning algorithms. We utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging data of three age groups (6 to 11, 11 to 18, and 6 to 18 years), available with public databases ABIDE-I and ABIDE-II, to discriminate between ASD and typically developing. The blood-oxygen-level dependent time series were extracted using the Gordon's, Harvard Oxford and Diedrichsen's atlases, over 236 regions of interest, as 236x236 sized FC matrices for each participant, with Pearson correlations. The feature sets, in the form of FC heat maps were computed with respect to each age group and were fed to a convolutional neural network, such as MobileNetV2 and DenseNet201 to build age-specific diagnostic models. The results revealed that DenseNet201 was able to adapt and extract better features from the heat maps, and hence returned better accuracy scores. The age-specific dataset, with participants of ages 6 to 11 years, performed best, followed by 11 to 18 years and 6 to 18 years, with accuracy scores of 72.19%, 71.88%, and 69.74% respectively, when tested using the DenseNet201. Our results suggest that age-specific diagnostic models are able to counter heterogeneity present in ASD, and that enables better discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we automated the diagnostic procedure of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with the help of anatomical alterations found in structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) data of the ASD brain and machine learning tools. Initially, the sMRI data was preprocessed using the FreeSurfer toolbox. Further, the brain regions were segmented into 148 regions of interest using the Destrieux atlas. Features such as volume, thickness, surface area, and mean curvature were extracted for each brain region, and the morphological connectivity was computed using Pearson correlation. These morphological connections were fed to XGBoost for feature reduction and to build the diagnostic model. The results showed an average accuracy of 94.16% for the top 18 features. The frontal and limbic regions contributed more features to the classification model. Our proposed method is thus effective for the classification of ASD and can also be useful for the screening of other similar neurological disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we analyzed the utility of electromyogram (EMG) signals recorded from the zygomaticus major (zEMG), the trapezius (tEMG), and the corrugator supercilii (cEMG) for emotion detection. We computed eleven-time domain features from the EMG signals to classify the emotions such as amusing, boring, relaxing, and scary. The features were fed to the logistic regression, support vector machine, and multilayer perceptron classifiers, and model performance was evaluated. We achieved an average 10-fold cross-validation classification accuracy of 67.29%. 67.92% and 64.58% by LR using the features extracted from the EMG signals recorded from the zEMG, tEMG, and cEMG, respectively. The classification accuracy improved to 70.6% while combining features from the zEMG and cEMG for the LR model. However, the performance dropped while including the features of EMG from all three locations. Our study shows the importance of utilizing the zEMG and cEMG combination for emotion recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we classify the seizure types using feature extraction and machine learning algorithms. Initially, we pre-processed the electroencephalogram (EEG) of focal non-specific seizure (FNSZ), generalized seizure (GNSZ), tonic-clonic seizure (TCSZ), complex partial seizure (CPSZ) and absence seizure (ABSZ). Further, 21 features from time (9) and frequency (12) domain were computed from the EEG signals of different seizure types. XGBoost classifier model was built for individual domain features and combination of time and frequency features and validated the results using 10-fold cross-validation. Our results revealed that the classifier model with combination of time and frequency features performed well followed by the time and frequency domain features. We obtained a highest multi-class accuracy of 79.72% for the classification of five types of seizure while using all the 21 features. The band power between 11-13 Hz was found to be the top feature in our study. The proposed study can be used for the seizure type classification in clinical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study used functional magnetic resonance imaging and fractal functional connectivity (FC) methods to analyze the brain networks of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and typically developing participants using data available on ABIDE databases. Blood-Oxygen-Level-Dependent time series were extracted from 236 regions of interest of cortical, subcortical, and cerebellar regions using Gordon’s, Harvard Oxford, and Diedrichsen atlases respectively. We computed the fractal FC matrices which resulted in 27,730 features, ranked using XGBoost feature ranking. Logistic regression classifiers were used to analyze the performance of the top 0.1%, 0.3%, 0.5%, 0.7%, 1%, 2%, and 3% of FC metrics. Results showed that 0.5% percentile features performed better, with average 5-fold accuracy of 94%. The study identified significant contributions from dorsal attention (14.75%), cingulo-opercular task control (14.39%), and visual networks (12.59%). This study could be used as an essential brain FC method to diagnose ASD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we examined the structural connectivity (SC) of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typical development using the distance correlation and machine learning algorithm. We preprocessed diffusion tensor images using a standard pipeline and parcellated the brain into 48 regions using atlas. We derived diffusion measures in white matter tracts, such as fractional anisotropy, radial diffusivity, axial diffusivity, mean diffusivity, and mode of anisotropy. Additionally, SC is determined by the Euclidean distance between these features. The SC were ranked using XGBoost and significant features were fed as the input to the logistic regression classifier. We obtained an average 10-fold cross-validation classification accuracy of 81% for the top 20 features. The SC computed from the anterior limb of internal capsule L to superior corona radiata R regions significantly contributed to the classification models. Our study shows the potential utility of adopting SC changes as the biomarker for the diagnosis of ASD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, a new method for detecting emotions using Blood Volume Pulse (BVP) signals and machine learning was presented. The BVP of 30 subjects from the publicly available CASE dataset was pre-processed, and 39 features were extracted from various emotional states, such as amusing, boring, relaxing, and scary. The features were categorized into time, frequency, and time-frequency domains and used to build an emotion detection model with XGBoost. The model achieved the highest classification accuracy of 71.88% using the top 10 features. The most significant features of the model were computed from time (5 features), time-frequency (4 features), and frequency (1 feature) domains. The skewness calculated from the time-frequency representation of the BVP was ranked highest and played a crucial role in the classification. Our study suggests the potential of using BVP recorded from wearable devices to detect emotions in healthcare applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we attempted to classify categorical emotional states using Electrodermal Activity (EDA) signals and a configurable Convolutional Neural Network (cCNN). The EDA signals from the publicly available, Continuously Annotated Signals of Emotion dataset were down-sampled and decomposed into phasic components using the cvxEDA algorithm. The phasic component of EDA was subjected to Short-Time Fourier Transform-based time-frequency representation to obtain spectrograms. These spectrograms were input to the proposed cCNN to automatically learn the prominent features and discriminate varied emotions such as amusing, boring, relaxing, and scary. Nested k-Fold cross-validation was used to evaluate the robustness of the model. The results indicated that the proposed pipeline could discriminate the considered emotional states with a high average classification accuracy, recall, specificity, precision, and F-measure scores of 80.20%, 60.41%, 86.8%, 60.05%, and 58.61%, respectively. Thus, the proposed pipeline could be valuable in examining diverse emotional states in normal and clinical conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disability caused by differences in the brain regions. Analysis of differential expression (DE) of transcriptomic data allows for genome-wide analysis of gene expression changes related to ASD. De-novo mutations may play a vital role in ASD, but the list of genes involved is still far from complete. Differentially expressed genes (DEGs) are treated as candidate biomarkers and a small set of DEGs might be identified as biomarkers using either biological knowledge or data-driven approaches like machine learning and statistical analysis. In this study, we employed a machine learning-based approach to identify the differential gene expression between ASD and Typical Development (TD). The gene expression data of 15 ASD and 15 TD were obtained from the NCBI GEO database. Initially, we extracted the data and used a standard pipeline to pre-process the data. Further, Random Forest (RF) was used to discriminate genes between ASD and TD. We identified the top 10 prominent differential genes and compared them with the statistical test results. Our results show that the proposed RF model yields 5-fold cross-validation accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of 96.67%. Further, we obtained precision and F-measure scores of 97.5% and 96.57%, respectively. Moreover, we found 34 unique DEG chromosomal locations having influential contributions in identifying ASD from TD. We have also identified chr3:113322718-113322659 as the most significant contributing chromosomal location in discriminating ASD and TD. Our machine learning-based method of refining DE analysis is promising for finding biomarkers from gene expression profiles and prioritizing DEGs. Moreover, our study reported top 10 gene signatures for ASD may facilitate the development of reliable diagnosis and prognosis biomarkers for screening ASD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder characterized by recurrent seizures. Automated prediction of epileptic seizures is essential in monitoring the health of an epileptic individual to avoid cognitive problems, accidental injuries, and even fatality. In this study, scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings of epileptic individuals were used to predict seizures using a configurable Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) machine learning algorithm. Initially, the EEG data was preprocessed using a standard pipeline. We investigated 36 minutes before the onset of the seizure to classify between the pre-ictal and inter-ictal states. Further, temporal and frequency domain features were extracted from the different intervals of the pre-ictal and inter-ictal periods. Then, the XGBoost classification model was utilized to optimize the best interval for the pre-ictal state to predict the seizure by applying Leave one patient out cross-validation. Our results suggest that the proposed model could predict seizures 10.17 minutes before the onset. The highest classification accuracy achieved was 83.33 %. Thus, the suggested framework can be optimized further to select the best features and prediction interval for more accurate seizure forecasting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electrodermal activity (EDA) reflects sympathetic nervous system activity through sweating-related changes in skin conductance. Decomposition analysis is used to deconvolve the EDA into slow and fast varying tonic and phasic activity, respectively. In this study, we used machine learning models to compare the performance of two EDA decomposition algorithms to detect emotions such as amusing, boring, relaxing, and scary. The EDA data considered in this study were obtained from the publicly available Continuously Annotated Signals of Emotion (CASE) dataset. Initially, we pre-processed and deconvolved the EDA data into tonic and phasic components using decomposition methods such as cvxEDA and BayesianEDA. Further, 12 time-domain features were extracted from the phasic component of EDA data. Finally, we applied machine learning algorithms such as logistic regression (LR) and support vector machine (SVM), to evaluate the performance of the decomposition method. Our results imply that the BayesianEDA decomposition method outperforms the cvxEDA. The mean of the first derivative feature discriminated all the considered emotional pairs with high statistical significance (p<0.05). SVM was able to detect emotions better than the LR classifier. We achieved a 10-fold average classification accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, and f1-score of 88.2%, 76.25%, 92.08%, 76.16%, and 76.15% respectively, using BayesianEDA and SVM classifiers. The proposed framework can be utilized to detect emotional states for the early diagnosis of psychological conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electroencephalography (EEG) has recently gained popularity in user authentication systems since it is unique and less impacted by fraudulent interceptions. Although EEG is known to be sensitive to emotions, understanding the stability of brain responses to EEG-based authentication systems is challenging. In this study, we compared the effect of different emotion stimuli for the application in the EEG-based biometrics system (EBS). Initially, we preprocessed audio-visual evoked EEG potentials from the 'A Database for Emotion Analysis using Physiological Signals' (DEAP) dataset. A total of 21 time-domain and 33 frequency-domain features were extracted from the considered EEG signals in response to Low valence Low arousal (LVLA) and High valence low arousal (HVLA) stimuli. These features were fed as input to an XGBoost classifier to evaluate the performance and identify the significant features. The model performance was validated using leave-one-out cross-validation. The pipeline achieved high performance with multiclass accuracy of 80.97% and a binary-class accuracy of 99.41% with LVLA stimuli. In addition, it also achieved recall, precision and F-measure scores of 80.97%, 81.58% and 80.95%, respectively. For both the cases of LVLA and LVHA, skewness was the stand-out feature. We conclude that boring stimuli (negative experience) that fall under the LVLA category can elicit a more unique neuronal response than its counterpart the LVHA (positive experience). Thus, the proposed pipeline involving LVLA stimuli could be a potential authentication technique in security applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alterations to the brainstem can hamper cognitive functioning, including audiovisual and behavioral disintegration, leading to individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) face challenges in social interaction. In this study, a process pipeline for the diagnosis of ASD has been proposed, based on geometrical and Zernike moments features, extracted from the brainstem of ASD subjects. The subjects considered for this study are obtained from publicly available data base ABIDE (300 ASD and 300 typically developing (TD)). Distance regularized level set (DRLSE) method has been used to segment the brainstem region from the midsagittal view of MRI data. Similarity measures were used to validate the segmented images against the ground truth images. Geometrical and Zernike moments features were extracted from the segmented images. The significant features were used to train Support vector machine (SVM) classifier to perform classification between ASD and TD subjects. The similarity results show high matching between DRLSE segmented brainstem and ground truth with high similarity index scores of Pearson Heron-II (PH II) = 0.9740 and Sokal and Sneath-II (SS II) = 0.9727. The SVM classifier achieved 70.53% accuracy to classify ASD and TD subjects. Thus, the process pipeline proposed in this study is able to achieve good accuracy in the classification of ASD subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Re-discovery of known metabolites is a common challenge in natural product-based drug discovery, and to avoid re-discovery, dereplication has been proposed for identifying known metabolites at the early stage of isolation. A majority of methods use LCMS to profile the extract and ignore the known mass. LC-HRMS profiling may generate a long mass list of metabolites. The identification of a new metabolite is difficult within the mass list. To overcome this, it was hypothesized that identifying a 'new metabolite' in the whole metabolome is more difficult than identifying it within the class of metabolites. A prioritization strategy was proposed to focus on the elimination of unknown and uncommon metabolites first using the designed bias filters and to prioritize the known secondary metabolites. The study employed Murraya paniculata root for the identification of new metabolites. The LC-HRMS-generated mass list of 509 metabolites was subjected to various filters, which resulted in 93 metabolites. Subsequently, it was subjected to regular dereplication, resulting in 10 coumarins, among which 3 were identified as new. Further, chromatographic efforts led to the isolation of a new coumarin, named ghosalin (1). The structure of the new compound was established through 2D NMR and X-ray crystallography. Cytotoxicity studies revealed that ghosalin has significant cytotoxicity against cancer cell lines. The proposed prioritization strategy demonstrates an alternative way for the rapid annotation of a particular set of metabolites to isolate a new metabolite from the whole metabolome of a plant extract.

In this study, a new method for detecting emotions using Blood Volume Pulse (BVP) signals and machine learning was presented. The BVP of 30 subjects from the publicly available CASE dataset was pre-processed, and 39 features were extracted from various emotional states, such as amusing, boring, relaxing, and scary. The features were categorized into time, frequency, and time-frequency domains and used to build an emotion detection model with XGBoost. The model achieved the highest classification accuracy of 71.88% using the top 10 features. The most significant features of the model were computed from time (5 features), time-frequency (4 features), and frequency (1 feature) domains. The skewness calculated from the time-frequency representation of the BVP was ranked highest and played a crucial role in the classification. Our study suggests the potential of using BVP recorded from wearable devices to detect emotions in healthcare applications.

Electrodermal activity (EDA) reflects sympathetic nervous system activity through sweating-related changes in skin conductance. Decomposition analysis is used to deconvolve the EDA into slow and fast varying tonic and phasic activity, respectively. In this study, we used machine learning models to compare the performance of two EDA decomposition algorithms to detect emotions such as amusing, boring, relaxing, and scary. The EDA data considered in this study were obtained from the publicly available Continuously Annotated Signals of Emotion (CASE) dataset. Initially, we pre-processed and deconvolved the EDA data into tonic and phasic components using decomposition methods such as cvxEDA and BayesianEDA. Further, 12 time-domain features were extracted from the phasic component of EDA data. Finally, we applied machine learning algorithms such as logistic regression (LR) and support vector machine (SVM), to evaluate the performance of the decomposition method. Our results imply that the BayesianEDA decomposition method outperforms the cvxEDA. The mean of the first derivative feature discriminated all the considered emotional pairs with high statistical significance (p<0.05). SVM was able to detect emotions better than the LR classifier. We achieved a 10-fold average classification accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, and f1-score of 88.2%, 76.25%, 92.08%, 76.16%, and 76.15% respectively, using BayesianEDA and SVM classifiers. The proposed framework can be utilized to detect emotional states for the early diagnosis of psychological conditions.