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Abstract Tuberculosis (TB), caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, has a significant impact on global health worldwide. The development of multi-drug resistant strains that are resistant to the first-line drugs isoniazid and rifampicin threatens public health security. Rifampicin and isoniazid resistance are largely underpinned by mutations in rpoB and katG respectively and are associated with fitness costs. Compensatory mutations are considered to alleviate these fitness costs and have been observed in rpoC/rpoA (rifampicin) and oxyR’-ahpC (isoniazid). We developed a framework (CompMut-TB) to detect compensatory mutations from whole genome sequences from a large dataset comprised of 18,396 M . tuberculosis samples. We performed association analysis (Fisher’s exact tests) to identify pairs of mutations that are associated with drug-resistance, followed by mediation analysis to identify complementary or full mediators of drug-resistance. The analyses revealed several potential mutations in rpoC (N = 47), rpoA (N = 4), and oxyR’-ahpC (N = 7) that were considered either ‘highly likely’ or ‘likely’ to confer compensatory effects on drug-resistance, including mutations that have previously been reported and validated. Overall, we have developed the CompMut-TB framework which can assist with identifying compensatory mutations which is important for more precise genome-based profiling of drug-resistant TB strains and to further understanding of the evolutionary mechanisms that underpin drug-resistance.

Background & Aims: The machinery that prevents colorectal cancer liver metastasis (CRLM) in the context of liver regeneration (LR) remains elusive. Ceramide (CER) is a potent anti-cancer lipid involved in intercellular interaction. Here, we investigated the role of CER metabolism in mediating the interaction between hepatocytes and metastatic colorectal cancer (CRC) cells to regulate CRLM in the context of LR. Methods: Mice were intrasplenically injected with CRC cells. LR was induced by 2/3 partial hepatectomy (PH) to mimic the CRLM in the context of LR. The alteration of corresponding CER-metabolizing genes was examined. The biological roles of CER metabolism in vitro and in vivo were examined by performing a series of functional experiments. Results: Induction of LR augmented apoptosis but promoted matrix metalloproteinase 2 (MMP2) expression and epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) to increase the invasiveness of metastatic CRC cells, resulting in aggressive CRLM. Up-regulation of sphingomyelin phosphodiesterase 3 (SMPD3) was determined in the regenerating hepatocytes after LR induction and persisted in the CRLM-adjacent hepatocytes after CRLM formation. Hepatic Smpd3 knockdown was found to further promote CRLM in the context of LR by abolishing mitochondrial apoptosis and augmenting the invasiveness in metastatic CRC cells by up-regulating MMP2 and EMT through promoting the nuclear translocation of β-catenin. Mechanistically, we found that hepatic SMPD3 controlled the generation of exosomal CER in the regenerating hepatocytes and the CRLM-adjacent hepatocytes. The SMPD3-produced exosomal CER critically conducted the intercellular transfer of CER from the hepatocytes to metastatic CRC cells and impeded CRLM by inducing mitochondrial apoptosis and restricting the invasiveness in metastatic CRC cells. The administration of nanoliposomal CER was found to suppress CRLM in the context of LR substantially. Conclusions: SMPD3-produced exosomal CER constitutes a critical anti-CRLM mechanism in LR to impede CRLM, offering the promise of using CER as a therapeutic agent to prevent the recurrence of CRLM after PH.

Hydrocolloids have been widely used to adjust properties of natural starches, but related research on kudzu starch is still rare. In this study, we investigated the effects of gum arabic (AG), sodium alginate (SA), locust bean gum (LG), and guar gum (GG) on kudzu starch from the perspective of its particle size, pasting, texture, rheology, dehydration rate, thermal properties, microstructure, and sensitivity to amyloglucosidase. Results showed that GG significantly increased the particle size of starch. Addition of AG led to lower peak-, final- and holding-viscosity. SA increased the retention viscosity of kudzu starch, while LG and GG increased its peak viscosity. Addition of hydrocolloids increased the hardness, chewiness, and cohesiveness of starch-hydrocolloid complexes, and reduced the dehydration rate of complex gels. Dynamic rheological data showed that the energy storage modulus (G′) was significantly higher than the loss modulus (G″). The magnitude of modulus increased with frequency, and elastic properties were better than viscous properties. Thermal analysis showed that hydrocolloids increased the starting temperature (To), and the final temperature (Tc). With addition of each of these four hydrocolloids, a more regular and porous thick-wall dense structure was formed, which effectively lowered kudzu starch's sensitivity to amyloglucosidase. It indicated that the binding of hydrocolloid to starch may slow down glucose release into blood during digestion. These results will help understand effects of natural hydrocolloid on kudzu starch, as well as expanding its application in food industry.

In this work, water-soluble zein/sodium caseinate (SC) nanoparticles were prepared as a delivery system of antimicrobials through anti-solvent procedure. Two model antimicrobials (nisin and thymol) were coencapsulated into zein particles by different interaction. Release properties indicate that zein colloid particles can be used not only in neutral food but also in acidic foods. It is worth mention that the release of thymol was delayed simply by adding nisin. To investigate the antimicrobial properties of zein/SC particles, Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis, Listeria monocytogenes were selected as gram-negative and gram-positive indicator bacteria. CO2 produced by incubated germs was detected by headspace gas chromatography. Long-term effective antimicrobial activities of zein particles in Luria broth was attained by burst release of nisin and slowly sustained release of thymol. Synergistic antimicromibial properties against L. monocytogenes of thymol and nisin loaded by zein/SC particles in milk were also observed. The antimicrobial property of zein/SC particles could enhance microbial safety of food, giving this delivery system promising applications in food industry.

Blind spot confirmation as a major challenge in surgical practice has led to booming of 3D modeling and printing technology and applications, but existing technologies could not offer readily available service of medical images in the operation room (OR) for surgeons. Contacting with keyboards and mice or asking assistants to help in viewing medical images during the operation could increase operation risk, infection and prolong of the operation time. This paper presents a new precise contactless medical image multimodal interaction system for surgeons in the OR. By supporting seamless multimodal interaction via 2D laser positioning, 3D gesture and voice recognition, it overcomes the design flaws in other similar solutions such as big motion for gesture recognition, round trip towards the screen of surgons, difficulty in selection and comparison of images, and more. Following the system engineering and evidence-based approaches, the design and development of this new precise contactless multimodal medical image interaction system meet surgeons' real world requirements for efficient and effective 2D medical images and 3D model operation under both preoperative and intraoperative scenarios. The system evaluation study is carried out in conjunction with a group of 10 neurosurgeons with 3 to 10 years' of surgical experience from different hospitals. Evaluation results successfully demonstrate the system's feasibility, efficiency and usability of in surgical contexts.

Abstract Background In recent years, the availability of publicly available data related to public health has significantly increased. These data have substantial potential to develop public health policy; however, this requires meaningful and insightful analysis. Our aim is to demonstrate how data analysis techniques can be used to address the issues of data reduction, prediction and explanation using online available public health data, in order to provide a sound basis for informing public health policy. Methods Observational suicide prevention data were analysed from an existing online United Kingdom national public health database. Multi-collinearity analysis and principal-component analysis were used to reduce correlated data, followed by regression analyses for prediction and explanation of suicide. Results Multi-collinearity analysis was effective in reducing the indicator set of predictors by 30% and principal component analysis further reduced the set by 86%. Regression for prediction identified four significant indicator predictors of suicide behaviour (emergency hospital admissions for intentional self-harm, children leaving care, statutory homelessness and self-reported well-being/low happiness) and two main component predictors (relatedness dysfunction, and behavioural problems and mental illness). Regression for explanation identified significant moderation of a well-being predictor (low happiness) of suicide behaviour by a social factor (living alone), thereby supporting existing theory and providing insight beyond the results of regression for prediction. Two independent predictors capturing relatedness needs in social care service delivery were also identified. Conclusions We demonstrate the effectiveness of regression techniques in the analysis of online public health data. Regression analysis for prediction and explanation can both be appropriate for public health data analysis for a better understanding of public health outcomes. It is therefore essential to clarify the aim of the analysis (prediction accuracy or theory development) as a basis for choosing the most appropriate model. We apply these techniques to the analysis of suicide data; however, we argue that the analysis presented in this study should be applied to datasets across public health in order to improve the quality of health policy recommendations.

In the past several years, we have seen dramatic advancements in many sectors enabled by the use of computing and networking technologies. This development has resulted in many emerging, highly multi-disciplinary research areas typically termed as smart- technologies, including smart-healthcare, smart-home, smart-grid, as well as smart vehicles and intelligent transportation systems. These new technologies are transforming our society and have an enormous economic impact.

With the mobile Internet development, e-health has become increasingly connected with people's daily life. However, health information on Internet is severely corrupted by misinformation, especially for the aged. It is necessary to analyze the characteristics of health-related misinformation on Internet and to design automated detection tools. In this study, we focus on analyzing common characteristics of reliable and unreliable health-related information on Chinese online social media, and exploring possible detection method using machine learning algorithms. We first collect a dataset containing both reliable and unreliable health-related articles from multiple Chinese online social media sites, with 2,296 reliable and 2,085 unreliable included. Then we analyze their differences with respect to writing style, text topic and feature distribution by both intuitive and statistical analysis. We also manually select 104 linguistic and statistical features that are useful for machine learning classifiers. Lastly, we propose a Health-related Misinformation Detection framework (HMD) that includes a feature-based method and a text-based method for detecting unreliable health-related information. Experiments verifies the performance of our proposed HMD method.

Skin problems not only injure physical health but also induce psychological problems, especially for patients whose faces have been damaged or even disfigured. Using smart devices, most of the people are able to obtain convenient clinical images of their face skin condition. On the other hand, the convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved near or even better performance than human beings in the imaging field. Therefore, this paper studied different CNN algorithms for face skin disease classification based on the clinical images. First, from Xiangya-Derm, which is, to the best of our knowledge, China's largest clinical image dataset of skin diseases, we established a dataset that contains 2656 face images belonging to six common skin diseases [seborrheic keratosis (SK), actinic keratosis (AK), rosacea (ROS), lupus erythematosus (LE), basal cell carcinoma (BCC), and squamous cell carcinoma (SCC)]. We performed studies using five mainstream network algorithms to classify these diseases in the dataset and compared the results. Then, we performed studies using an independent dataset of the same disease types, but from other body parts, to perform transfer learning on our models. Comparing the performances, the models that used transfer learning achieved a higher average precision and recall for almost all structures. In the test dataset, which included 388 facial images, the best model achieved 92.9%, 89.2%, and 84.3% recalls for the LE, BCC, and SK, respectively, and the mean recall and precision reached 77.0% and 70.8%.

Coronary artery disease has emerged as one of the major diseases causing death worldwide. Coronary stent has great effect to improve blood flow to the myocardium subtended by that artery, in which bioresorbable vascular scaffolds are new-generation stents used by people. However, Coronary stents implantation has a risk of restenosis, which is relative to hemodynamic parameters. Most of existing literatures studied in this issue have not taken into account such important factors as the strut thickness and lumen profile, and has yet to analyze the time effects among hemodynamic parameters over a certain period of time based on individual models. In this research, we proposed a framework to assess the chronic impact of hemodynamic on coronary stent implantation. In the framework, the optical coherence tomography (OCT) is combined with angiography to reconstruct patient-specific models of bioresorbable vascular scaffolds. Then, the hemodynamics parameters are extracted through the simulated 3D models, obtaining the distribution of wall shear stress (WSS), relative residence time (RRT) and oscillatory shear index (OSI). Finally, the changes of these parameters representing the effectiveness of hemodynamics exerted on the implanted stent can be assessed to estimate the chronic impacts. By a 9-month follow-up case study, it is observed that the difference of hemodynamic parameters are not significance. Both at baseline and 9-month follow-up experiments show that the hemodynamic parameters remain normal and similar, proving that the coronary stent implantation nowadays appears to have a robust and everlasting curative effect.

Volume rendering is an emerging technique widely used in the medical field to visualize human organs using tomography image slices. In volume rendering, sliced medical images are transformed into attributes, such as color and opacity through transfer function. Thus, the design of the transfer function directly affects the result of medical images visualization. A well-designed transfer function can improve both the image quality and visualization speed. In one of our previous paper, we designed a multi-dimensional transfer function based on region growth to determine the transparency of a voxel, where both gray threshold and gray change threshold are used to calculate the transparency. In this paper, a new approach of the transfer function is proposed based on clustering analysis of gray-gradient mode histogram, where volume data is represented in a two-dimensional histogram. Clustering analysis is carried out based on the spatial information of volume data in the histogram, and the transfer function is automatically generated by means of clustering analysis of the spatial information. The dataset of human thoracic is used in our experiment to evaluate the performance of volume rendering using the proposed transfer function. By comparing with the original transfer function implemented in two popularly used volume rendering systems, visualization toolkit (VTK) and RadiAnt DICOM Viewer, the effectiveness and performance of the proposed transfer function are demonstrated in terms of the rendering efficiency and image quality, where more accurate and clearer features are presented rather than a blur red area. Furthermore, the complex operations on the two-dimensional histogram are avoided in our proposed approach and more detailed information can be seen from our final visualized image.

Automatic segmentation of lumen contour plays an important role in medical imaging and diagnosis, which is the first step towards the evaluation of morphology of vessels under analysis and the identification of possible atherosclerotic lesions. Meanwhile, quantitative information can only be obtained with segmentation, contributing to the appearance of novel methods which can be successfully applied to intravascular optical coherence tomography (IVOCT) images. This paper proposed a new end-to-end neural network (N-Net) for the automatic lumen segmentation, using multi-scale features based deep neural network, for IVOCT images. The architecture of the N-Net contains a multi-scale input layer, a N-type convolution network layer and a cross-entropy loss function. The multi-scale input layer in the proposed N-Net is designed to avoid the loss of information caused by pooling in traditional U-Net and also enriches the detailed information in each layer. The N-type convolutional network is proposed as the framework in the whole deep architecture. Finally, the loss function guarantees the degree of fidelity between the output of proposed method and the manually labeled output. In order to enlarge the training set, data augmentation is also introduced. We evaluated our method against loss, accuracy, recall, dice similarity coefficient, jaccard similarity coefficient and specificity. The experimental results presented in this paper demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed N-Net architecture, comparing to some existing networks, for enhancing the precision of automatic lumen segmentation and increasing the detailed information of edges of the vascular lumen.

Recently, telemedicine has been widely applied in remote diagnosis, treatment and counseling, where the Internet of Things (IoT) technology plays an important role. In the process of telemedicine, data are collected from remote medical equipment, such as CT machine and MRI machine, and then transmitted and reconstructed locally in three-dimensions. Due to the large amount of data to be transmitted in the reconstructed model and the small storage capacity, data need to be compressed progressively before transmission. On this basis, we proposed a lightweight progressive transmission algorithm based on large data visualization in telemedicine to improve transmission efficiency and achieve lossless transmission of original data. Moreover, a novel four-layer system architecture based on IoT has been introduced, including the sensing layer, analysis layer, network layer and application layer. In this way, the three-dimensional reconstructed data at the local end is compressed and transmitted to the remote end, and then visualized at the remote end to show reconstructed 3D models. Thus, it is conducive to doctors in remote real-time diagnosis and treatment, and then realize the data processing and transmission between doctors, patients and medical equipment.

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has received increasing attention as a complementary approach or alternative to modern medicine. However, experimental methods for identifying novel targets of TCM herbs heavily relied on the current available herb-compound-target relationships. In this work, we present an Herb-Target Interaction Network (HTINet) approach, a novel network integration pipeline for herb-target prediction mainly relying on the symptom related associations. HTINet focuses on capturing the low-dimensional feature vectors for both herbs and proteins by network embedding, which incorporate the topological properties of nodes across multi-layered heterogeneous network, and then performs supervised learning based on these low-dimensional feature representations. HTINet obtains performance improvement over a well-established random walk based herb-target prediction method. Furthermore, we have manually validated several predicted herb-target interactions from independent literatures. These results indicate that HTINet can be used to integrate heterogeneous information to predict novel herb-target interactions. Keywords: Network medicine, Herb target prediction, Symptoms, Network embedding

Social relationships refer to the connections that exist between people and indicate how people interact in society. The effective recognition of social relationships is conducive to further understanding human behavioral patterns and thus can be vital for more complex social intelligent systems, such as interactive robots and health self-management systems. The existing works about social relation recognition (SRR) focus on extracting features on different scales but lack a comprehensive mechanism to orchestrate various features which show different degrees of importance. In this paper, we propose a new SRR framework, namely Multi-level Transformer-Based Social Relation Recognition (MT-SRR), for better orchestrating features on different scales. Specifically, a vision transformer (ViT) is firstly employed as a feature extraction module for its advantage in exploiting global features. An intra-relation transformer (Intra-TRM) is then introduced to dynamically fuse the extracted features to generate more rational social relation representations. Next, an inter-relation transformer (Inter-TRM) is adopted to further enhance the social relation representations by attentionally utilizing the logical constraints among relationships. In addition, a new margin related to inter-class similarity and a sample number are added to alleviate the challenges of a data imbalance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MT-SRR can better fuse features on different scales as well as ameliorate the bad effect caused by a data imbalance. The results on the benchmark datasets show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with significant improvement.

As a well-established multidrug combinations schema, traditional Chinese medicine (herbal prescription) has been used for thousands of years in real-world clinical settings. This paper uses a complex network approach to investigate the regularities underlying multidrug combinations in herbal prescriptions. Using five collected large-scale real-world clinical herbal prescription datasets, we construct five weighted herbal combination networks with herb as nodes and herbal combinational use in herbal prescription as links. We found that the weight distribution of herbal combinations displays a clear power law, which means that most herb pairs were used in low frequency and some herb pairs were used in very high frequency. Furthermore, we found that it displays a clear linear negative correlation between the clustering coefficients and the degree of nodes in the herbal combination network (HCNet). This indicates that hierarchical properties exist in the HCNet. Finally, we investigate the molecular network interaction patterns between herb related target modules (i.e., subnetworks) in herbal prescriptions using a network-based approach and further explore the correlation between the distribution of herb combinations and prescriptions. We found that the more the hierarchical prescription, the better the corresponding effect. The results also reflected a well-recognized principle called “Jun-Chen-Zuo-Shi” in TCM formula theories. This also gives references for multidrug combination development in the field of network pharmacology and provides the guideline for the clinical use of combination therapy for chronic diseases.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD), which most commonly occurs in the elder, is a chronic neurodegenerative disease with no agreed drugs or treatment protocols at present. Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), earlier than AD onset and later than subjective cognitive decline (SCD) onset, has a serious probability of converting into AD. The SCD, which can last for decades, subjectively complains of decline impairment in memory. Distinct altered patterns of default mode network (DMN) subnetworks connected to the whole brain are perceived as prominent hallmarks of the early stages of AD. Nevertheless, the aberrant phase position connectivity (PPC) connected to the whole brain in DMN subnetworks remains unknown. Here, we hypothesized that there exist distinct variations of PPC in DMN subnetworks connected to the whole brain for patients with SCD and aMCI, which might be acted as discriminatory neuroimaging biomarkers. We recruited 27 healthy controls (HC), 20 SCD and 28 aMCI subjects, respectively, to explore aberrant patterns of PPC in DMN subnetworks connected to the whole brain. In anterior DMN (aDMN), SCD group exhibited aberrant PPC in the regions of right superior cerebellum lobule (SCL), right superior frontal gyrus of medial part (SFGMP), and left fusiform gyrus (FG) in comparison of HC group, by contrast, no prominent difference was found in aMCI group. It is important to note that aMCI group showed increased PPC in the right SFGMP in comparison with SCD group. For posterior DMN (pDMN), SCD group showed decreased PPC in the left superior parietal lobule (SPL) and right superior frontal gyrus (SFG) compared to HC group. It is noteworthy that aMCI group showed decreased PPC in the left middle frontal gyrus of orbital part (MFGOP) and right SFG compared to HC group, yet increased PPC was found in the left superior temporal gyrus of temporal pole (STGTP). Additionally, aMCI group exhibited decreased PPC in the left MFGOP compared to SCD group. Collectively, our results have shown that the aberrant regions of PPC observed in DMN are related to cognitive function, and it might also be served as impressible neuroimaging biomarkers for timely intervention before AD occurs.

This paper presents a novel approach, adaptive spectrum noise cancellation (ASNC), for motion artifacts removal in photoplethysmography (PPG) signals measured by an optical biosensor to obtain clean PPG waveforms for heartbeat rate calculation. One challenge faced by this optical sensing method is the inevitable noise induced by movement when the user is in motion, especially when the motion frequency is very close to the target heartbeat rate. The proposed ASNC utilizes the onboard accelerometer and gyroscope sensors to detect and remove the artifacts adaptively, thus obtaining accurate heartbeat rate measurement while in motion. The ASNC algorithm makes use of a commonly accepted spectrum analysis approaches in medical digital signal processing, discrete cosine transform, to carry out frequency domain analysis. Results obtained by the proposed ASNC have been compared with the classic algorithms, the adaptive threshold peak detection and adaptive noise cancellation. The mean (standard deviation) absolute error and mean relative error of heartbeat rate calculated by ASNC is 0.33 (0.57) beats min-1 and 0.65%, by adaptive threshold peak detection algorithm is 2.29 (2.21) beats min-1 and 8.38%, by adaptive noise cancellation algorithm is 1.70 (1.50) beats min-1 and 2.02%. While all algorithms performed well with both simulated PPG data and clean PPG data collected from our verity device in situations free of motion artifacts, ASNC provided better accuracy when motion artifacts increase, especially when motion frequency is very close to the heartbeat rate.

With the popularity of surveillance cameras and the development of deep learning, significant progress has been made in the field of smart surveillance. Face recognition is one of the most important yet challenging tasks in human-centered smart surveillance, especially in public security, criminal investigation and anti-terrorism, and so on. Although, the state-of-the-art algorithms for face recognition have achieved dramatically improved results and have been widely applied in authentication scenario, the occlusion problem on face is still one of the critical issues for personal identification in smart surveillance, especially in the occasion of terrorist searching and identification. To address this issue, this paper proposed a new approach for eyes-to-face synthesis and personal identification for human-centered smart surveillance. An end-toend network based on conditional generative adversarial networks (GAN) is designed to generate the face information based only on the available data of eyes region. To obtain photorealistic faces and identitypreserving information, a synthesis loss function based on feature loss, GAN loss, and total variation loss is proposed to guide the training process. Both the subject and objective experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method can preserve the identity based on eyes-only data, and provide a potential solution for the identification of person even in the case of face occlusion.

Egocentric action recognition has been intensively studied in the fields of computer vision and clinical science with applications in pervasive health-care. The majority of the existing egocentric action recognition techniques utilize the features extracted from either the entire contents or the regions of interest (ROI) in video frames as the inputs of action classifiers. The former might suffer from moving backgrounds or irrelevant foregrounds usually associated with egocentric action videos, while the latter may be impaired by the mismatch between the calculated and the ground truth ROI. This paper proposes a new gaze-informed feature extraction approach, by which the features are extracted from the regions around the gaze points and thus representing the genuine ROI from a first person of view. The activity of daily life can then be classified based only on the identified regions using the extracted gaze-informed features. The proposed approach has been further applied to a memory support system for people with poor memory, such as those with amnesia or dementia, and their carers. The experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach in egocentric action recognition, and thus the potential of the memory support tool in health care.

With the increase of the global aging population, elderly care has become an important social issue around the world. Human-centered telehealth provides more efficient and comfortable health-care services for elderly people through collecting the elderly's information remotely. Video taken by wearable cameras is one of the most efficient carriers for human-centered telehealth. Whereas wearable cameras are mainly limited in energy supply and computation, the conventional video codecs such as H.26x requiring encoders with powerful processing ability are thus not suitable. Distributed video coding (DVC) based on the Wyner-Ziv (WZ) coding architecture, namely, WZ video coding, can exploit the source statistics only at decoders. It thus provides an efficient solution for low-power wearable cameras. Nevertheless, the compression performance gap between the DVC and the conventional video coding still exists. One of the main reasons for this weakness is the quality of the side information (SI). As the estimation of the current WZ frame, the SI provides the important inter-frame correlation for the correlation noise statistics. In this paper, a novel algorithm is proposed for the SI refinement first. The proposed refinement algorithm iteratively learns the difference between the already decoded information of the current WZ frame and the SI, and makes a targeted refinement for the SI quality. Subsequently, a progressively refined correlation noise model is proposed based on the novel SI refinement algorithm. The progressively refined WZ video coding is thus achieved. The performance evaluations show that the proposed technique advances over the existing DVC systems. The proposed technique provides an efficient way to improve the video compression performance for the low-power wearable cameras in human-centered telehealth.

With the arrival of the Web 2.0 era and the rapid development of virtual reality (VR) technology in recent years, WebVR technology has emerged as the combination of Web 2.0 and VR. Moreover, the concept of “WebVR + medical science”is also proposed to advance medical applications. However, due to the limited storage space and low computing capability of Web browsers, it is difficult to achieve real-time rendering of large-scale medical vascular models on the Web, let alone large-scale vascular animation simulations. The framework proposed in this paper can achieve virtual display of the medical blood vasculum, including lightweight processing of the vasculum and virtual realization of blood flow. This innovative framework presents a simulation algorithm for the virtual blood path based on the Catmull-Rom spline. The mechanisms of progressive compression and online recovery of the lightweight vascular structure are further proposed. The experimental results show that our framework has a shorter browser-side response time than existing methods and achieves efficient real-time simulation.

The ischaemic heart disease has become one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide. Dynamic single-photon emission computed tomography (D-SPECT) is an advanced routine diagnostic tool commonly used to validate the myocardial function in patients suffering from various heart diseases. Accurate automatic localization and segmentation of myocardial regions is helpful in creating a 3-D myocardial model and assisting clinicians to perform assessments of myocardial function. Thus, image segmentation is a key technology in preclinical cardiac studies. Intensity inhomogeneity is one of the common challenges in image segmentation and is caused by image artifacts and instrument inaccuracy. In this paper, a novel region-based active contour model that can segment the myocardial D-SPECT image accurately is presented. First, a local region-based fitting image is defined based on the information related to the intensity. Second, a likelihood fitting image energy function is built in a local region around each point in a given vector-valued image. Next, the level set method is used to present a global energy function with respect to the neighborhood center. The proposed approach guarantees precision and computational efficiency by combining the region-scalable fitting energy model and local image fitting energy model, and it can solve the issue of high sensitivity to initialization for myocardial D-SPECT segmentation.

The wider use of wearable devices for electroencephalogram (EEG) data capturing provides a very useful way for the monitoring and self-management of human health. However, the large volumes of data with high dimensions cause computational complexity in EEG data processing and pose a great challenge to the use of wearable EEG devices in healthcare. This paper proposes a new approach to extract the structural information of EEG data and tackle the curse of dimensionality of the EEG data. A set of methods for dimensionality reduction (DR)-like linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and their improved methods have been developed for EEG processing in the literature. However, the existing LDA-related methods suffer from the singularity problem or expensive computational cost, and none of existing methods take into consideration the structure of the projection matrix, which is crucial for the extraction of the structural information of the EEG data. In this paper, a new method called a regularized matrix discriminant analysis (R-MDA) is proposed for EEG feature representation and DR. In the R-MDA, the EEG data are represented as a data matrix, and projection vectors are reshaped to be a set of projection matrices stacking together. By reformulating the LDA as a least-square formulation and imposing specified constraint on each projection matrix, the new R-MDA has been constructed to effectively reduce EEG dimensions and capturing the structural information of the EEG data. Experimental results demonstrate that this new R-MDA outperforms the existing LDA-related methods, including achieving improved accuracy with significant DR of the EEG data. This offers an effective way to enable wearable EEG devices be applicable in human-centered health monitoring.

It is becoming a challenging issue for users to choose a satisfied service to fit their need due to the rapid growing number of cloud services and the vast amount of service type varieties. This paper proposes an effective cloud service recommendation approach, named personalized cloud service recommendation (P-CSREC), based on the characterization of heterogeneous information network, the use of association rule mining, and the modeling and clustering of user interests. First, a similarity measure is defined to improve the average similarity (AvgSim) measure by the inclusion of the subjective evaluation of users' interests. Based on the improved AvgSim, a new model for measuring the user interest is established. Second, the traditional K-Harmonic Means (KHM) clustering algorithm is improved by means of involving multi meta-paths to avoid the convergence of local optimum. Then, a frequent pattern growth (FP-Growth) association rules algorithm is proposed to address the issue and the limitation of traditional association rule algorithms to offer personalization in recommendation. A new method to define a support value of nodes is developed using the weight of user's score. In addition, a multi-level FP-Tree is defined based on the multi-level association rules theory to extract the relationship in higher level. Finally, a combined user interest with the improved KHM clustering algorithm and the improved FP-Growth algorithm is provided to improve accuracy of cloud services recommendation to target users. The experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach in improving the computational efficiency and recommendation accuracy.

Nonhealing wounds pose a major challenge in clinical medicine. Typical chronic wounds, such as diabetic foot ulcers and venous leg ulcers, have brought substantial difficulties to millions of patients around the world. The management of chronic wound care remains challenging in terms of precise wound size measurement, comprehensive wound assessment, timely wound healing monitoring, and efficient wound case management. Despite the rapid progress of digital health technologies in recent years, practical smart wound care management systems are yet to be developed. One of the main difficulties is in-depth communication and interaction with nurses and doctors throughout the complex wound care process. This paper presents a systematic approach for the user-centered design and development of a new smart mobile system for the management of chronic wound care that manages the nurse's task flow and meets the requirements for the care of different types of wounds in both clinic and hospital wards. The system evaluation and satisfaction review was carried out with a group of ten nurses from various clinical departments after using the system for over one month. The survey results demonstrated high effectiveness and usability of the smart mobile system for chronic wound care management, in contrast to the traditional pen-and-paper approach, in busy clinical contexts.

The integrative analysis of multimodal medical images plays an important role in the diagnosis of coronary artery disease by providing additional comprehensive information that cannot be found in an individual source image. Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) and optical coherence tomography (IV-OCT) are two imaging modalities that have been widely used in the medical practice for the assessment of arterial health and the detection of vascular lumen lesions. IV-OCT has a high resolution and poor penetration, while IVUS has a low resolution and high detection depth. This paper proposes a new approach for the fusion of intravascular ultrasound and optical coherence tomography pullbacks to significantly improve the use of those two types of medical images. It also presents a new two-phase multimodal fusion framework using a coarse-to-fine registration and a wavelet fusion method. In the coarse-registration process, we define a set of new feature points to match the IVUS image and IV-OCT image. Then, the improved quality image is obtained based on the integration of the mutual information of two types of images. Finally, the matched registered images are fused with an approach based on the new proposed wavelet algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed new approach for significantly enhancing both the precision and computational stability. The proposed approach is shown to be promising for providing additional information to enhance the diagnosis and enable a deeper understanding of atherosclerosis.

Recent research has reported the application of image fusion technologies in medical images in a wide range of aspects, such as in the diagnosis of brain diseases, the detection of glioma and the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. In our study, a new fusion method based on the combination of the shuffled frog leaping algorithm (SFLA) and the pulse coupled neural network (PCNN) is proposed for the fusion of SPECT and CT images to improve the quality of fused brain images. First, the intensity-hue-saturation (IHS) of a SPECT and CT image are decomposed using a non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) independently, where both low-frequency and high-frequency images, using NSCT, are obtained. We then used the combined SFLA and PCNN to fuse the high-frequency sub-band images and low-frequency images. The SFLA is considered to optimize the PCNN network parameters. Finally, the fused image was produced from the reversed NSCT and reversed IHS transforms. We evaluated our algorithms against standard deviation (SD), mean gradient (Ḡ), spatial frequency (SF) and information entropy (E) using three different sets of brain images. The experimental results demonstrated the superior performance of the proposed fusion method to enhance both precision and spatial resolution significantly.

Despite the new ideas were inspired in medical treatment by the rapid advancement of three-dimensional (3D) printing technology, there is still rare research work reported on 3D printing of coronary arteries being documented in the literature. In this work, the application value of 3D printing technology in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases has been explored via comparison study between the 3D printed vascular solid model and the computer aided design (CAD) model. In this paper, a new framework is proposed to achieve a 3D printing vascular model with high simulation. The patient-specific 3D reconstruction of the coronary arteries is performed by the detailed morphological information abstracted from the contour of the vessel lumen. In the process of reconstruction which has 5 steps, the morphological details of the contour view of the vessel lumen are merged along with the curvature and length information provided by the coronary angiography. After comparing with the diameter of the narrow section and the diameter of the normal section in CAD models and 3D printing model, it can be concluded that there is a high correlation between the diameter of vascular stenosis measured in 3D printing models and computer aided design models. The 3D printing model has high-modeling ability and high precision, which can represent the original coronary artery appearance accurately. It can be adapted for prevascularization planning to support doctors in determining the surgical procedures.

The urban environment has a great impact on the wellbeing of citizens and it is of great significance to understand how citizens perceive and evaluate places in a large scale urban region and to provide scientific evidence to support human-centered urban planning with a better urban environment. Existing studies for assessing urban perception have primarily relied on low efficiency methods, which also result in low evaluation accuracy. Furthermore, there lacks a sophisticated understanding on how to correlate the urban perception with the built environment and other socio-economic data, which limits their applications in supporting urban planning. In this study, a new data-enabled intelligence framework for evaluating human perceptions of urban space is proposed. Specifically, a novel classification-then-regression strategy based on a deep convolutional neural network and a random-forest algorithm is proposed. The proposed approach has been applied to evaluate the perceptions of Beijing and Chengdu against six perceptual criteria. Meanwhile, multi-source data were employed to investigate the associations between human perceptions and the indicators for the built environment and socio-economic data including visual elements, facility attributes and socio-economic indicators. Experimental results show that the proposed framework can effectively evaluate urban perceptions. The associations between urban perceptions and the visual elements, facility attributes and a socio-economic dimension have also been identified, which can provide substantial inputs to guide the urban planning for a better urban space.

People’s interactions with each other form the social relations in society. Understanding human social relations in the public space is of great importance for supporting the public administrations. Recognizing social relations through visual data captured by remote sensing cameras is one of the most efficient ways to observe human interactions in a public space. Generally speaking, persons in the same scene tend to know each other, and the relations between person pairs are strongly correlated. The scene information in which people interact is also one of the important cues for social relation recognition (SRR). The existing works have not explored the correlations between the scene information and people’s interactions. The scene information has only been extracted on a simple level and high level semantic features to support social relation understanding are lacking. To address this issue, we propose a social relation structure-aware local–global model for SRR to exploit the high-level semantic global information of the scene where the social relation structure is explored. In our proposed model, the graph neural networks (GNNs) are employed to reason through the interactions (local information) between social relations and the global contextual information contained in the constructed scene-relation graph. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed local–global information-reasoned social relation recognition model (SRR-LGR) can reason through the local–global information. Further, the results of the final model show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we have further discussed whether the global information contributes equally to different social relations in the same scene, by exploiting an attention mechanism in our proposed model. Further applications of SRR for human-observation are also exploited.

For urban planning and environmental monitoring, it is essential to understand the diversity and complexity of cities to identify urban functional regions accurately and widely. However, the existing methods developed in the literature for identifying urban functional regions have mainly been focused on single remote sensing image data or social sensing data. The multi-dimensional information which was attained from various data source and could reflect the attribute or function about the urban functional regions that could be lost in some extent. To sense urban functional regions comprehensively and accurately, we developed a multi-mode framework through the integration of spatial geographic characteristics of remote sensing images and the functional distribution characteristics of social sensing data of Point-of-Interest (POI). In this proposed framework, a deep multi-scale neural network was developed first for the functional recognition of remote sensing images in urban areas, which explored the geographic feature information implicated in remote sensing. Second, the POI function distribution was analyzed in different functional areas of the city, then the potential relationship between POI data categories and urban region functions was explored based on the distance metric. A new RPF module is further deployed to fuse the two characteristics in different dimensions and improve the identification performance of urban region functions. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method can efficiently achieve the accuracy of 82.14% in the recognition of functional regions. It showed the great usability of the proposed framework in the identification of urban functional regions and the potential to be applied in a wide range of areas.

Dynamic path planning is one of the key procedures for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to successfully fulfill the diversified missions. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for path planning based on ant colony optimization (ACO) and artificial potential field. In the proposed algorithm, both dynamic threats and static obstacles are taken into account to generate an artificial field representing the environment for collision free path planning. To enhance the path searching efficiency, a coordinate transformation is applied to move the origin of the map to the starting point of the path and in line with the source-destination direction. Cost functions are established to represent the dynamically changing threats, and the cost value is considered as a scalar value of mobile threats which are vectors actually. In the process of searching for an optimal moving direction for UAV, the cost values of path, mobile threats, and total cost are optimized using ant optimization algorithm. The experimental results demonstrated the performance of the new proposed algorithm, which showed that a smoother planning path with the lowest cost for UAVs can be obtained through our algorithm.

Egocentric video analysis is an important tool in healthcare that serves a variety of purposes, such as memory aid systems and physical rehabilitation, and feature extraction is an indispensable process for such analysis. Local feature descriptors have been widely applied due to their simple implementation and reasonable efficiency and performance in applications. This paper proposes an enhanced spatial and temporal local feature descriptor extraction method to boost the performance of action classification. The approach allows local feature descriptors to take advantage of saliency maps, which provide insights into visual attention. The effectiveness of the proposed method was validated and evaluated by a comparative study, whose results demonstrated an improved accuracy of around 2%.

Malaria, as one of the most serious infectious diseases causing public health problems in the world, affects about two-thirds of the world population, with estimated resultant deaths close to a million annually. The effects of this disease are much more profound in third world countries, which have very limited medical resources. When an intense outbreak occurs, most of these countries cannot cope with the high number of patients due to the lack of medicine, equipment and hospital facilities. The prevention or reduction of the risk factor of this disease is very challenging, especially in third world countries, due to poverty and economic insatiability. Technology can offer alternative solutions by providing early detection mechanisms that help to control the spread of the disease and allow the management of treatment facilities in advance to ensure a more timely health service, which can save thousands of lives. In this study, we have deployed an intelligent malaria outbreak early warning system, which is a mobile application that predicts malaria outbreak based on climatic factors using machine learning algorithms. The system will help hospitals, healthcare providers, and health organizations take precautions in time and utilize their resources in case of emergency. To our best knowledge, the system developed in this paper is the first publicly available application. Since confounding effects of climatic factors have a greater influence on the incidence of malaria, we have also conducted extensive research on exploring a new ecosystem model for the assessment of hidden ecological factors and identified three confounding factors that significantly influence the malaria incidence. Additionally, we deploy a smart healthcare application; this paper also makes a significant contribution by identifying hidden ecological factors of malaria.

Genome-wide microarray technology has facilitated the systematic discovery of diagnostic biomarkers of cancers and other pathologies. However, meta-analyses of published arrays often uncover significant inconsistencies that hinder advances in clinical practice. Here we present an integrated microarray analysis framework, based on a genome-wide relative significance (GWRS) and genome-wide global significance (GWGS) model. When applied to five microarray datasets on melanoma published between 2000 and 2011, this method revealed a new signature of 200 genes. When these were linked to so-called ‘melanoma driver’ genes involved in MAPK, Ca2+, and WNT signaling pathways we were able to produce a new 12-gene diagnostic biomarker signature for melanoma (i.e., EGFR, FGFR2, FGFR3, IL8, PTPRF, TNC, CXCL13, COL11A1, CHP2, SHC4, PPP2R2C, and WNT4). We have begun to experimentally validate a subset of these genes involved in MAPK signaling at the protein level, including CXCL13, COL11A1, PTPRF and SHC4 and found these to be over-expressed in metastatic and primary melanoma cells in vitro and in situ compared to melanocytes cultured from healthy skin epidermis and normal healthy human skin. While SHC4 has been reported previously to be associated to melanoma, this is the first time CXCL13, COL11A1, and PTPRF have been associated with melanoma on experimental validation. Our computational evaluation indicates that this 12-gene biomarker signature achieves excellent diagnostic power in distinguishing metastatic melanoma from normal skin and benign nevus. Further experimental validation of the role of these 12 genes in a new signaling network may provide new insights into the underlying biological mechanisms driving the progression of melanoma.