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In this paper, we develop a low-cost cellular internet of medical things (IoMT)-based electrocardiogram (ECG) recorder for monitoring heart conditions and used in practical cases. In order to remove noise from signals recorded by these non-clinical devices, we propose a cloud-based denoising approach that focuses on utilizing deep neural network techniques in the time-frequency domain through the two stages. Accordingly, we exploit the fractional Stockwell transform (FrST) to transfer the ECG signal into the time-frequency domain and apply the deep robust two-stage network (DeepRTSNet) for noise cancellation. Due to the practical use case, the various heart physiologies and noise levels in different amplitudes and frequencies are needed to be robust against wide-range noises in actual conditions. We utilize the MIT-BIH Apnea-ECG database (APNEA-ECG) with several different heart physiologies. Next, the different noises consisting of muscle artifacts (MA), baseline wander (BW), and electrode motion (EM) from the MIT-BIH Noise Stress Test Database (NSTDB) and random noise, are added to the signals. The main focus of the noise generation part is the fast Fourier transformation (FFT) of the simulated noisy signal and the practical noisy signal has a maximum cross-correlation to gain a better morphological resemblance between realistic signals and the prepared datasets. Based on the results, DeepRTSNet outperforms prior learning-based methods and conventional non-learning approaches in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), root mean square error (RMSE), and percent root mean square difference (PRD). Moreover, outcomes reveal that DeepRTSNet has an extraordinary performance with a certain amount of further complexity than others.

Non-invasive measures have a critical role in precision livestock and poultry farming as they can reduce animal stress and provide continuous monitoring. Animal activity can reflect physical and mental states as well as health conditions. If any problems are detected, an early warning will be provided for necessary actions. The objective of this study was to identify avian diseases by using thermal-image processing and machine learning. Four groups of 14-day-old Ross 308 Broilers (20 birds per group) were used. Two groups were infected with one of the following diseases: Newcastle Disease (ND) and Avian Influenza (AI), and the other two were considered control groups. Thermal images were captured every 8 h and processed with MATLAB. After de-noising and removing the background, 23 statistical features were extracted, and the best features were selected using the improved distance evaluation method. Support vector machine (SVM) and artificial neural networks (ANN) were developed as classifiers. Results indicated that the former classifier outperformed the latter for disease classification. The Dempster–Shafer evidence theory was used as the data fusion stage if neither ANN nor SVM detected the diseases with acceptable accuracy. The final SVM-based framework achieved 97.2% and 100% accuracy for classifying AI and ND, respectively, within 24 h after virus infection. The proposed method is an innovative procedure for the timely identification of avian diseases to support early intervention.

Abstract Objective The most common histopathologic malignant and benign nodules are Adenocarcinoma and Granuloma, respectively, which have different standards of care. In this paper, we propose an automatic framework for the diagnosis of the Adenocarcinomas and the Granulomas in the CT scans of the chest from a private dataset. We use the radiomic features of the nodules and the attached vessel tortuosity for the diagnosis. The private dataset includes 22 CTs for each nodule type, i.e., adenocarcinoma and granuloma. The dataset contains the CTs of the non-smoker patients who are between 30 and 60 years old. To automatically segment the delineated nodule area and the attached vessels area, we apply a morphological-based approach. For distinguishing the malignancy of the segmented nodule, two texture features of the nodule, the curvature Mean and the number of the attached vessels are extracted. Results We compare our framework with the state-of-the-art feature selection methods for differentiating Adenocarcinomas from Granulomas. These methods employ only the shape features of the nodule, the texture features of the nodule, or the torsion features of the attached vessels along with the radiomic features of the nodule. The accuracy of our framework is improved by considering the four selected features.

Abstract Adenocarcinomas and active granulomas can both have a spiculated appearance on computed tomography (CT) and both are often fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) avid on positron emission tomography (PET) scan, making them difficult to distinguish. Consequently, patients with benign granulomas are often subjected to invasive surgical biopsies or resections. In this study, quantitative vessel tortuosity (QVT), a novel CT imaging biomarker to distinguish between benign granulomas and adenocarcinomas on routine non-contrast lung CT scans is introduced. Our study comprised of CT scans of 290 patients from two different institutions, one cohort for training (N = 145) and the other (N = 145) for independent validation. In conjunction with a machine learning classifier, the top informative and stable QVT features yielded an area under receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC AUC) of 0.85 in the independent validation set. On the same cohort, the corresponding AUCs for two human experts including a radiologist and a pulmonologist were found to be 0.61 and 0.60, respectively. QVT features also outperformed well known shape and textural radiomic features which had a maximum AUC of 0.73 (p-value = 0.002), as well as features learned using a convolutional neural network AUC = 0.76 (p-value = 0.028). Our results suggest that QVT features could potentially serve as a non-invasive imaging biomarker to distinguish granulomas from adenocarcinomas on non-contrast CT scans.

One of the major concerns in photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) is obtaining a high-quality image using the minimum number of ultrasound transducers/view angles. This issue is of importance when a cost-effective PACT system is needed. On the other hand, analytical reconstruction algorithms such as back projection (BP) and time reversal, when a limited number of view angles is used, cause artifacts in the reconstructed image. Iterative algorithms provide a higher image quality, compared to BP, due to a model used for image reconstruction. The performance of the model can be further improved using the sparsity concept. In this paper, we propose using a novel sparse dictionary to capture important features of the photoacoustic signal and eliminate the artifacts while few transducers is used. Our dictionary is an optimum combination of Wavelet Transform (WT), Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), and Total Variation (TV). We utilize two quality assessment metrics including peak signal-to-noise ratio and edge preservation index to quantitatively evaluate the reconstructed images. The results show that the proposed method can generate high-quality images having fewer artifacts and preserved edges, when fewer view angles are used for reconstruction in PACT.