IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine

Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is a device that allows the direct visualization of gastrointestinal tract with minimal discomfort for the patient, but at the price of a large amount of time for screening. In order to reduce this time, several works have proposed to automatically remove all the frames showing intestinal content. These methods label frames as {intestinal content- clear} without discriminating between types of content (with different physiological meaning) or the portion of image covered. In addition, since the presence of intestinal content has been identified as an indicator of intestinal motility, its accurate quantification can show a potential clinical relevance...

Traditional risk score prediction is based on vital signs and clinical assessment. In this paper, we present an intelligent scoring system for the prediction of cardiac arrest within 72 h. The patient population is represented by a set of feature vectors, from which risk scores are derived based on geometric distance calculation and support vector machine. Each feature vector is a combination of heart rate variability (HRV) parameters and vital signs. Performance evaluation is conducted on the leave-one-out cross-validation framework, and receiver operating characteristic, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value are reported...

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No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Throughout various complex processes within hospitals, context-aware services and applications can help to improve the quality of care and reduce costs. For example, sensors and radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies for e-health have been deployed to improve the flow of material, equipment, personal, and patient. Bed tracking, patient monitoring, real-time logistic analysis, and critical equipment tracking are famous applications of real-time location systems (RTLS) in hospitals. In fact, existing case studies show that RTLS can improve service quality and safety, and optimize emergency management and time critical processes...

This paper details the full design, implementation and validation of an e-health service in order to improve the community health care services for patients with cognitive disorders. Specifically, the new service allows Parkinson's disease patients benefit from the possibility of doing Cognitive Stimulation Therapy at home by using a familiar device such as a TV set. Its use instead a PC could be a major advantage for some patients whose lack of familiarity with the use of a PC means that they can do therapy only in the presence of a therapist...

Segmentation of coronary arteries in X-Ray angiography is a fundamental tool to evaluate arterial diseases and choose proper coronary treatment. The accurate segmentation of coronary arteries has become an important topic for the registration of different modalities which allows physicians rapid access to different medical imaging information from Computed Tomography (CT) scans or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). In this paper, we propose an accurate fully automatic algorithm based on Graph-cuts for vessel centerline extraction, caliber estimation, and catheter detection...

Mandibular angle reduction is a popular and efficient procedure widely used to alter the facial contour. The primary surgical instruments, the reciprocating saw and the round burr, employed in the surgery have a common feature: operating at a high-speed. Generally, inexperienced surgeons need a long-time practice to learn how to minimize the risks caused by the uncontrolled contacts and cutting motions in manipulation of instruments with high-speed reciprocation or rotation. A virtual reality-based surgical simulator for the mandibular angle reduction was designed and implemented on a CUDA-based platform in this paper...

Current clinical methods for the assessment of Parkinson's disease suffer from inconvenience, infrequency and subjectivity. WiiPD is an approach for the objective home based assessment of Parkinson's disease which utilizes the intuitive and sensor rich Nintendo Wii Remote. Combined with an electronic patient diary, a suite of mini-games, a metric analyzer, and a visualization engine, we propose that this system can complement existing clinical practice by providing objective metrics gathered frequently over extended periods of time...

Remote Health Monitoring (RHM) programmes are being increasingly developed to face the pervasive diffusion of chronic diseases. RHM strongly relies on ICT intelligent platforms devised to remotely acquire multisource data, process these according to specific domain knowledge and support clinical decision making. However, since RHM domain is continuously evolving and the pertinent knowledge is not yet consolidated, there is a great demand for services and tools that allow the encoded knowledge to be modified and enriched...

Biomedical research continuously generates large amounts of heterogeneous and multimodal data spread over multiple data sources. These data, if appropriately shared and exploited, could dramatically improve the research practice itself, and ultimately the quality of health care delivered. This paper presents DISMED (DIstributed Semantic MEDiator), an open source semantic mediator that provides a unified view of a federated environment of multiscale biomedical data sources. DISMED is a Web-based software application to query and retrieve information distributed over a set of registered data sources, using semantic technologies...

Medical data is an ever-growing source of information generated from the hospitals in the form of patient records. When mined properly the information hidden in these records is a huge resource bank for medical research. As of now, this data is mostly used only for clinical work. This data often contains hidden patterns and relationships, that can lead to better diagnosis, better medicines, better treatment and overall, a platform to better understand the mechanisms governing almost all aspects of the medical domain...

Traditional cephalometry with a cast-mounted articulator is a useful and well-established tool for orthognathic surgery 7 planning. However, 2-D planning with dental casts cannot provide 8 comprehensive information on facial bone conditions, especially 9 with regards to symmetry. To plan and predict postsurgical facial 10 symmetry and occlusions, this paper uses an optical navigation system to track the movement of the upper and lower dental models 12 in model surgery. The corresponding movement and the new position of the jawbones are demonstrated in the computer and the 14 symmetry status can be evaluated...

We propose a novel computer vision based fall detection system for monitoring an elderly person in a home care application. Background subtraction is applied to extract the foreground human body and the result is improved by using certain post-processing. Information from ellipse fitting and a projection histogram along the axes of the ellipse are used as the features for distinguishing different postures of the human. These features are then fed into a directed acyclic graph support vector machine (DAGSVM) for posture classification, the result of which is then combined with derived floor information to detect a fall...

Pressure ulcer is a critical problem for bed-ridden and wheelchair-bound patients, diabetics, and the elderly. Patients need to be regularly repositioned to prevent excessive pressure on a single area of body, which can lead to ulcers. Pressure ulcers are extremely costly to treat and may lead to several other health problems, including death. The current standard for prevention is to reposition at-risk patients every two hours. Even if it is done properly, a fixed schedule is not sufficient to prevent all ulcers...

Complicated breathing behaviors including uncertain and irregular patterns can affect the accuracy of predicting respiratory motion for precise radiation dose delivery [3-6, 25, 36]. So far investigations on irregular breathing patterns have been limited to respiratory monitoring of only extreme inspiration and expiration [37]. Using breathing traces acquired on a Cyberknife treatment facility, we retrospectively categorized breathing data into several classes based on the extracted feature metrics derived from breathing data of multiple patients...

This paper presents a novel computer-aided diagnosis system for melanoma. The novelty lies in the optimised selection and integration of features derived from textural, borderbased and geometrical properties of the melanoma lesion. The texture features are derived from using wavelet-decomposition, the border features are derived from constructing a boundaryseries model of the lesion border and analysing it in spatial and frequency domains, and the geometry features are derived from shape indexes. The optimised selection of features is achieved by using the Gain-Ratio method, which is shown to be computationally efficient for melanoma diagnosis application...

Hospital patient outcomes can be improved by the early identification of physiological deterioration. Automatic methods of detecting patient deterioration in vital-sign data typically attempt to identify deviations from assumed normal physiological conditions, which is a one-class approach to classification. This paper investigates the use of a two-class approach, in which abnormal physiology is modelled explicitly. The success of such a method relies on the accuracy of data labels provided by clinical experts, which may be incomplete (due to large dataset size) or imprecise (due to clinical labels covering intervals, rather than each data point within those intervals)...

Given the poor prognosis of esophageal cancer and the invasiveness of combined modality treatment, improved prognostic scoring systems are needed. We developed a fuzzy logic-based system to improve the predictive performance of a risk score based on the serum concentrations of C-reactive protein (CRP) and albumin in a cohort of 271 patients with esophageal cancer before radiotherapy. Univariate and multivariate survival analyses were employed to validate the independent prognostic value of the fuzzy risk score...

A Hospital Information Systems (HIS) have turned a hospital into a gigantic computer with huge computational power, huge storage and wired/wireless local area network. On the other hand, a modern medical device, such as echograph, is a computer system with several functional units connected by an internal network named a bus. Therefore, we can embed such a medical device into the HIS by simply replacing the bus with the local area network. This paper designed and developed two embedded systems, a ubiquitous echograph system and a networked digital camera...