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Metadata standards are well-established for many types of electrophysiological methods but are still lacking for microneurographic recordings of peripheral sensory nerve fibers in humans. Finding a solution for daily work in the laboratory is a complex process. We have designed templates based on odML and odML-tables to structure and capture metadata and provided an extension to the existing GUI to enable database searching.

Despite developments in wearable devices for detecting various bio-signals, continuous measurement of breathing rate (BR) remains a challenge. This work presents an early proof of concept that employs a wearable patch to estimate BR. We propose combining techniques for calculating BR from electrocardiogram (ECG) and accelerometer (ACC) signals, while applying decision rules based on signal-to-noise (SNR) to fuse the estimates for improved accuracy.

In a healthy state, pain plays an important role in natural biofeedback loops and helps to detect and prevent potentially harmful stimuli and situations. However, pain can become chronic and as such a pathological condition, losing its informative and adaptive function. Efficient pain treatment remains a largely unmet clinical need. One promising route to improve the characterization of pain, and with that the potential for more effective pain therapies, is the integration of different data modalities through cutting edge computational methods. Using these methods, multiscale, complex, and network models of pain signaling can be created and utilized for the benefit of patients. Such models require collaborative work of experts from different research domains such as medicine, biology, physiology, psychology as well as mathematics and data science. Efficient work of collaborative teams requires developing of a common language and common level of understanding as a prerequisite. One of ways to meet this need is to provide easy to comprehend overviews of certain topics within the pain research domain. Here, we propose such an overview on the topic of pain assessment in humans for computational researchers. Quantifications related to pain are necessary for building computational models. However, as defined by the International Association of the Study of Pain (IASP), pain is a sensory and emotional experience and thus, it cannot be measured and quantified objectively. This results in a need for clear distinctions between nociception, pain and correlates of pain. Therefore, here we review methods to assess pain as a percept and nociception as a biological basis for this percept in humans, with the goal of creating a roadmap of modelling options.

German Medical Data Sciences 2022 – Future Medicine: More Precise, More Integrative, More Sustainable!; Amsterdam : IOS Press, Studies in Health Technology and Informatics 296, 33-40 (2022). doi:10.3233/SHTI220801, Published by IOS Press, Amsterdam

There was an immediate ad-hoc response of the international scientific community to help scholars from universities affected by Russia's war in Ukraine. Official government-backed funding programmes later allowed the ad-hoc help offers to be sustainable and stable. The #ScienceForUkraine initiative is a grass-root initiative that emerged out of the desire to help; initially created as a central database for the worldwide offers for help. Its 133 active volunteers engaged with policy-makers and funding bodies to improve support to the Ukrainian academic community. The website scienceforukraine.eu became a central and well-known hub with a general database for help listings but also extensive curated link lists for further help. There were more than 120k visits in the past three months, 12k of which are reportedly from Ukraine. #ScienceForUkraine has many active country groups that flexibly respond to needs in their geographic area. Collecting information, creating posters for border stations, mentoring, consulting on how to organise transfers, and engaging with policy makers are some of the tasks performed by members. #ScienceForUkraine is active on all major social networks to be in touch with both the Western academic community (primarily Twitter and LinkedIn) and the Ukrainian academic community (mainly Facebook and Telegram); whereas students are reached mostly via Instagram. The initiative fulfils an important function by transmitting information from one sphere to the other. #ScienceForUkraine recorded well over 2,600 support listings (one listing may be directed at several scholars). 15% of these were offered by German institutions (410), followed by French (227) and Polish (183) institutions. no ISSN ispartof: SSRN vol:22-13 pages:1-44 status: published

Challenges of Trustable AI and Added-Value on Health : Proceedings of MIE 2022 / Edited by: Brigitte Séroussi, Patrick Weber, Ferdinand Dhombres, Cyril Grouin, Jan-David Liebe, Sylvia Pelayo, Andrea Pinna, Bastien Rance, Lucia Sacchi, Adrien Ugon, Arriel Benis, Parisis Gallos Medical Informatics Europe : Challenges of Trustable AI and Added-Value on Health, MIE 2022, Nice, France, 27 May 2022 - 30 May 2022; [Erscheinungsort nicht ermittelbar] : IOS Press, Studies in health technology and informatics 294, 957-958 (2022). doi:10.3233/SHTI220639, Published by IOS Press, [Erscheinungsort nicht ermittelbar]

In this paper a machine learning model for automatic detection of abnormalities in electroencephalography (EEG) is dissected into parts, so that the influence of each part on the classification accuracy score can be examined. The most successful setup of several shallow artificial neural networks aggregated via voting results in accuracy of 81%. Stepwise simplification of the model shows the expected decrease in accuracy, but a naive model with thresholding of a single extracted feature (relative wavelet energy) is still able to achieve 75%, which remains strongly above the random guess baseline of 54%. These results suggest the feasibility of building a simple classification model ensuring accuracy scores close to the state-of-the-art research but remaining fully interpretable.

openMNGlab is an open-source software framework for data analysis, tailored for the specific needs of microneurography – a type of electrophysiological technique particularly important for research on peripheral neural fibers coding. Currently, openMNGlab loads data from Spike2 and Dapsys, which are two major data acquisition solutions. By building on top of the Neo software, openMNGlab can be easily extended to handle the most common electrophysiological data formats. Furthermore, it provides methods for data visualization, fiber tracking, and a modular feature database to extract features for data analysis and machine learning.

One of the important questions in the research on neural coding is how the preceding axonal activity affects the signal propagation speed of the following one. We present an approach to solving this problem by introducing a multi-level spike count for activity quantification and fitting a family of linear regression models to the data. The best-achieved score is R2=0.89 and the comparison of different models indicates the importance of long and very short nerve fiber memory. Further studies are required to understand the complex axonal mechanisms responsible for the discovered phenomena.

The authors wish to make the following erratum to this paper [...]

Background Efficient planning of hospital bed usage is a necessary condition to minimize the hospital costs. In the presented work we deal with the problem of occupancy forecasting in the scale of several months, with a focus on personnel’s holiday planning. Methods We construct a model based on a set of recursive neural networks, which performs an occupancy prediction using historical admission and release data combined with external factors such as public and school holidays. The model requires no personal information on patients or staff. It is optimized for a 60 days forecast during the summer season (May–September). Results An average mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 6.24% was computed on 8 validation sets. Conclusions The proposed machine learning model has shown to be competitive to standard time-series forecasting models and can be recommended for incorporation in medium-size hospitals automatized scheduling and decision making.

We consider the hyperbolic generalization of Burgers equation with polynomial source term. The transformation of auto-B\"{a}cklund type was found. Application of the results is shown in the examples, where the pair of two stationary solutions produces kink and bi-kink solutions., Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures

We consider a three-dimensional three-time-scale system that was first proposed by Krupa et?al. (2008) under the additional assumption that two singular perturbation parameters are present in the equations. While the presence of three scales was shown to give rise to canard-induced periodic mixed-mode oscillations (MMOs) (Desroches et?al., 2012) in the parameter regime studied by Krupa et?al. (2008), we additionally observe mixed-mode patterns that display delayed-Hopf-type behaviour (Ne?shtadt, 1987). We present analytical and numerical evidence for the occurrence of stable periodic dynamics that realises both mechanisms, and we discuss the transition between them. To the best of our knowledge, the resulting mixed sector-delayed-Hopf-type MMO trajectories represent a novel class of mixed-mode dynamics in singularly perturbed systems of ordinary differential equations.

Following the paper of Shimizu et al. (Phys Lett A 375:1566, 2011), we consider the Bonhoeffer-van der Pol oscillator with non-autonomous periodic perturbation. We show that the presence of mixed mode oscillations reported in that paper can be explained using the geometric singular perturbation theory. The considered model can be re-written as a four-dimensional (locally three-dimensional) autonomous system, which under certain conditions has a folded saddle-node singularity and additionally can be treated as a three time scale one. Author is very grateful to prof. Peter De Maesschalck for many stimulating discussions. The presented research was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) under grant number G.0939.10N and by Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

We consider an extended three-dimensional Bonhoeffer-van der Pol oscillator which generalises the planar FitzHugh-Nagumo model from mathematical neuroscience, and which was recently studied by Sekikawa et al. (Phys Lett A 374(36):3745-3751, 2010) and by Freire and Gallas (Phys Lett A 375:1097-1103, 2011). Focussing on a parameter regime which has hitherto been neglected, and in which the governing equations evolve on three distinct time-scales, we propose a reduction to a model problem that was formulated by Krupa et al. (J Appl Dyn Syst 7(2):361-420, 2008) as a canonical form for such systems. Based on results previously obtained in Krupa et al. (2008), we characterise completely the mixed-mode dynamics of the resulting three time-scale extended Bonhoeffer-van der Pol oscillator from the point of view of geometric singular perturbation theory, thus complementing the findings reported in Sekikawa et al. (2010). In particular, we specify in detail the mixed-mode patterns that are observed upon variation of a bifurcation parameter which is naturally obtained by combining two of the original parameters in the system, and we derive asymptotic estimates for the corresponding parameter intervals. We thereby also disprove a conjecture of Tu (SIAM J Appl Math 49(2): 331-343, 1989), where it was postulated that no stable periodic orbits of mixed-mode type can be observed in an equivalent extension of the Bonhoeffer-van der Pol equations.

Direct algebraic method of obtaining exact solutions to nonlinear PDE's is applied to certain set of nonlinear nonlocal evolutionary equations, including nonlinear telegraph equation, hyperbolic generalization of Burgers equation and some spatially nonlocal hydrodynamic-type model. Special attention is paid to the construction of the kink-like and soliton-like solutions.

We analyze the conditions, which guarantee the existence of periodic and soliton-like traveling wave solutions in the non-local hydrodynamic model of structured media., 20 pages, 2 figures

In the paper we analyse the exact solutions to scalar PDEs obtained thanks to summable Taylor series provided by Adomian's decomposition method. We propose the modification of the method which makes the calculations of Taylor coefficients easier and more direct. The difference is essential for instance in case of nonautonomous equations and is illustrated by some exampl, 9 pages

We present a review of our recent works directed towards discovery of a periodic, kink-like and soliton-like travelling wave solutions within the models of transport phenomena and the mathematical biology. Analytical description of these wave patterns is carried out by means of our modification of the direct algebraic balance method. In the case when the analytical description fails, we propose to approximate invariant travelling wave solutions by means of an infinite series of exponential functions. The effectiveness of the method of approximation is demonstrated on a hyperbolic modification of Burgers equation., Published in SIGMA (Symmetry, Integrability and Geometry: Methods and Applications) at http://www.emis.de/journals/SIGMA/

We present new periodic, kink-like and soliton-like travelling wave solutions to the hyperbolic generalization of Burgers equation. To obtain them, we employ the classical and generalized symmetry methods and the ansatz-based approach, Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures