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Medical data exists in several formats, from structured data and medical reports to 1D signals, 2D images, 3D volumes, or even higher dimensional data such as temporal 3D sequences. Healthcare experts can make auscultation reports in text format; electrocardiograms can be printed in time series format, x-rays saved as images; volume can be provided through angiography; temporal information by echocardiograms, and 4D information extracted through flow MRI. Another typical source of variability is the existence of data from different time points, such as pre and post treatment, for instance. These large and highly diverse amounts of information need to be organized and mined in an appropriate way so that meaningful information can be extracted. New multimodal data fusion techniques are able to combine salient information into one single source to ensure better diagnostic accuracy and assessment. Data Fusion Techniques and Applications for Smart Healthcare covers cutting-edge research from both academia and industry with a particular emphasis on recent advances in algorithms and applications that involve combining multiple sources of medical information. This book can be used as a reference for practicing engineers, scientists, and researchers. It will also be useful for graduate students and practitioners from government and industry as well as healthcare technology professionals working on state-of-the-art information fusion solutions for healthcare applications. Presents broad coverage of applied case studies using data fusion techniques to mine, organize, and interpret medical dataInvestigates how data fusion techniques offer a new solution for dealing with massive amounts of medical data coming from diverse sources and multiple formatsFocuses on identifying challenges, solutions, and new directions that will be useful for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners from government, academia, industry, and healthcare

In The Promise of Piety, Arsalan Khan examines the zealous commitment to a distinct form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) among Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement the Tablighi Jamaat. This group says that Muslims have abandoned their religious duties for worldly pursuits, creating a state of moral chaos apparent in the breakdown of relationships in the family, nation, and global Islamic community. Tablighis insist that this dire situation can only be remedied by drawing Muslims back to Islam through dawat, which they regard as the sacred means for spreading Islamic virtue. In a country founded in the name of Muslim identity and where Islam is ubiquitous in public life, the Tablighi claim that Pakistani Muslims have abandoned Islam is particularly striking. The Promise of Piety shows how Tablighis constitute a distinct form of pious relationality in the ritual processes and everyday practices of dawat and how pious relationality serves as a basis for transforming domestic and public life. Khan explores both the promise and limits of the Tablighi project of creating an Islamic moral order that can transcend the political fragmentation and violence of life in postcolonial Pakistan.