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Explainer: An interactive Agent for Explaining the Diagnosis of Cardiac Arrhythmia Generated by IK-DCBRC
Get PDFInteractions between medical applications and users involve a high level of trust, since many complex, automated applications are integrated and involve critical domains in which public health is paramount. Although uncertainty decreases the accuracy and trust of such medical applications under these circumstances, explanation-aware computing becomes crucial in improving the efficiency of these applications. This paper describes an intelligent agent that interacts with users to provide meaningful explanations of previous diagnoses supported by IK-DCBRC. The agent ensures intelligent interactions with users via a rule-based system that generates appropriate explanations according to the selected level of abstraction and the detected cardiac arrhythmia. The paper also describes a particular medical application, that is, cardiac arrhythmia with automatic diagnoses supported by the case-based reasoning classifier, IK-DCBRC
Data-Based Risk Assessment of Cancer Diseases for Life Insurance
Get PDFUsing US cancer registry data of SEER (Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program), data based analyses of prevalence, incidence, and survival rates are able for the medical risk assessment in life insurance. Statistical analyses of cancer patients and base population were performed using SEER*Stat from the US National Cancer Institute. The system provides multivariate restrictions of patient groups and subdivisions of outcomes. The lecture focuses on survival time analyses and additional calculations for the outcome of extra mortality rates of cancer patients in relation to base population. Based on these extra mortality rates, principles of underwriting decisions in life insurance will be presented
Are the plants used in Algerian traditional medicine effective? : Assessment of the antibacterial, anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidative effects of three plants used in Algerian traditional medicine; Olea europaea, Glycyrrhiza glabra and Ocimum basilicum
Get PDFBackground: Algeria has a very large vegetation biodiversity. Algerians use herbs in phytotherapy because of their easy, safe and inexpensive use. However, the consumption of these plants remains uncontrolled or regulated by the authorities, which lacks reassurances concerning their use.
Objective: The purpose of this work is to confirm or refute the empirical use of the plants as well as to start adjusting the dosages for each therapeutic purpose.
Methods: The present experimentation was done during the year 2017 (April-June) at the laboratory for the valorization of natural biological substances at the University of Setif 1. The in vitro anti-inflammatory effect of Olive and basil leaves and Licorice root aqueous extracts were evaluated against Escherichia coli ATCC 25922, Pseudomonas aeruginosa ATCC 27853 and Staphylococcus aureus ATCC 25923 by the disc diffusion assay. The in vitro anti-inflammatory activity was realized by the estimation of the protein denaturation of the BSA and the anti-oxidative test was done by the DPPH method. All experiments were done in triplicate and results and were reported as mean ± SD. Data were analyzed by GraphPad prism 5 software; the statistical analysis was done by the one way ANOVA.
Results: Olive leaf extract (OLE) and Licorice root extract (LRE) were active on both E. coli (13.5, 10mm) and S. aureus (14, 12mm) at 200 mg/ml. While the Basil leaf extract (BLE) was inactive against all strains. The percentage of BSA denaturation was concentration-dependent by both BLE and LRE and the maximum inhibition was recorded by the OLE at 250 μg/ml, it was slightly different from BLE at P≤0.05, but not significantly different from LRE. The three extracts showed good values of IC50 with 0.65, 4.98 and 0.91 mg/ml OLE, LRE and BLE respectively, but they were inferior to that of BHT.
Conclusion: These results confirm the use of these plants but under control
Why Software-Defined Radio (SDR) Matters in Healthcare?
Get PDFBackground: Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have been drawing noteworthy academic and industrial attention. A WBAN states a network dedicated to acquire personal biomedical data via cutting-edge sensors and to transmit healthcare-related commands to particular types of actuators intended for health purposes. Still, different proprietary designs exist, which may lead to biased assessments. This paper studies the role of Software-Defined Radio (SDR) in a WBAN system for inpatient and outpatient monitoring and explains to health professionals the importance of the SDR within WBANs.
Methods: A concern related to all wireless networks is their dependence on hardware, which limits reprogramming or reconfiguration alternatives. If an error happens in the equipment, firmware, or software, then, typically, there will be no way to fix system vulnerabilities. SDR solves many fixed-hardware problems with other benefits.
Results: SDR entails more healthcare domain dynamics with more network convergence in agreement with the stakeholders involved. Then the SDR perspective can bring in innovation to the healthcare subsystems’ interoperability with recombination/reprogramming of their parts, updating, and malleability.
Conclusion: SDR technology has many utilizations in radio environments and is becoming progressively more widespread among all kinds of users. Nowadays, there are many frameworks to manipulate radio signals only with a computer and an inexpensive SDR arrangement. Moreover, providing a very cheap radio receiver/transmitter equipment, SDR devices can be merged with free software to simplify the spectrum analyses, provide interferences detection, deliver efficient frequency distribution assignments, test repeaters\u27 operation while measuring their parameters, identify spectrum intruders and characterize noise according to frequency bands
Feature extraction and segmentation of medical images for MRI and Digital mammogram
Get PDFDeveloping a computer aided diagnosis system (CAD) is an extremelychallenging task. One of the major goals of CAD is to help the radiologist to makegood decisions by detecting and analyzing characteristics of benign and malignant lesions. In this context, we present accurate and automatic method that, detect and extract malignancy descriptors of breast and meningioma brain tumor.Our applied an algorithm that uses enhancement image based on homomorphicfiltering and adaptive histogram equalization technique. This work was proposedby Zhang Chaofu et al. [3]. A region of interest is determinated using K meansclustering. And then, we employed basically wavelet transform to extract pertinent features for meningioma tumor, geometric and texture characteristics forbreast tumor in order to classify malignancy lesion
Health 4.0: Applications, Management, Technologies and Review
Get PDFThe Industry 4.0 Standard (I4S) employs technologies for automation and data exchange through cloud computing, Big Data (BD), Internet of Things (IoT), forms of wireless Internet, 5G technologies, cryptography, the use of semantic database (DB) design, Augmented Reality (AR) and Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR). Its healthcare extension is the so-called Health 4.0.
This study informs about Health 4.0 and its potential to extend, virtualize and enable new healthcare-related processes (e.g., home care, finitude medicine, and personalized/remotely triggered pharmaceutical treatments) and transform them into services.
In the future, these services will be able to virtualize multiple levels of care, connect devices and move to Personalized Medicine (PM). The Health 4.0 Cyber-Physical System (HCPS) contains several types of computers, communications, storage, interfaces, biosensors, and bioactuators. The HCPS paradigm permits observing processes from the real world, as well as monitoring patients before, during and after surgical procedures using biosensors. Besides, HCPSs contain bioactuators that accomplish the intended interventions along with other novel strategies to deploy PM. A biosensor detects some critical outer and inner patient conditions and sends these signals to a Decision-Making Unit (DMU). Mobile devices and wearables are present examples of gadgets containing biosensors. Once the DMU receives signals, they can be compared to the patient’s medical history and, depending on the protocols, a set of measures to handle a given situation will follow. The part responsible for the implementation of the automated mitigation actions are the bioactuators, which can vary from a buzzer to the remote-controlled release of some elements in a capsule inside the patient’s body.
Decentralizing health services is a challenge for the creation of health-related applications. Together, CBIR systems can enable access to information from multimedia and multimodality images, which can aid in patient diagnosis and medical decision-making.
Currently, the National Health Service addresses the application of communication tools to patients and medical teams to intensify the transfer of treatments from the hospital to the home, without disruption in outpatient services.
HCPS technologies share tools with remote servers, allowing data embedding and BD analysis and permit easy integration of healthcare professionals expertise with intelligent devices. However, it is undeniable the need for improvements, multidisciplinary discussions, strong laws/protocols, inventories about the impact of novel techniques on patients/caregivers as well as rigorous tests of accuracy until reaching the level of automating any medical care technological initiative
Designing and Implementing a Telemedicine System
Get PDFBackground: A modern tele-consultation system improves patients’ monitoring and favors remote assistance in terms of facilitating the daily life to the patients. The aim of this work is to design and implement a modern remote consultation system.
Methods: To achieve this work, we identify the actors who interact with the system to be developed and the use cases relating to each actor. A class model is designed to derive the relational model and the corresponding database. During implementation, we have used PHP language and MySQL database system.
Results: A tele-consultation framework is implemented. The users (patients and doctors) must register then authenticate in order to use the system. The latter allows them audio and video conversation between them.
Conclusion: We have given in this study how to design and implement a telemedicine system which will improve health care, ensure continuity of home care, prevent complications and thus limit hospitalizations and limit medical travel
Novel design of optical sensor based on two-dimensional photonic crystals for the detection of volatile organic compounds that can infect human health
Get PDFBackground: In recent research, optical sensors gained a growing interest motivated by the increasing need for specific sensors that allow for routine and effective measurements in several fields and analysis such as, safety, environment, and human health. Among optical sensors are photonic crystal sensors, which are characterized by high sensitivity and biocompatibility. The variations inside and around the photonic crystal can give important information by measuring the wavelength, the band gap, the output power…etc. Through defects created in photonic crystals such as missing rows of holes or rods, light is guided through and the goal is to achieve a very high sensitivity and spatial selectivity to changing superior bulk devices. In this study, we model a new structure of an optical channel drop filter (CDF) based on 2-dimensional photonic crystals to detect volatile organic compounds that can infect human health.
Objective: Detect the variation of the refractive index by fixing the radius (r) at 99.37nm and the lattice constant (a) at 523nm for various volatile organic compounds such as H2CO, CH2Cl2, and C2Cl4 with refractive indexes that are: 1.3746, 1.421 and 1.503 respectively in the optical sensor based on photonic crystals for reasons related to the protection of human health.
Methods: The structure is made of square lattice silicon rods immersed in air. The dielectric constant of silicon and air is 11.9716 and 1 respectively. First, we created a cross shape resonator and designed an optical channel drop filter in the heart of the structure; our method is based on plane wave expansion method (PWE) by using MATLAB software and the finite element method (F.E.M) with COMSOL software.
Results: Three volatile compounds have been studied, such as Dichloromethane used as synthesis intermediate by the chemical industry or solvent used in the pharmaceutical or medical industry. Acute inhalation exposure may cause severe optic neuropathy and liver attack (Hepatitis). Then, the Methanal is used to dry or kill the skin taking as an example, the medical treatment of warts. And perchlorethylene is used for the dry cleaning of tissues and for degreasing metals because it is in category 3 carcinogens, toxic to the nervous system and the kidney. These three volatile compounds where introduced and studied in the proposed structure. The results obtained through this study are as follows:
diagram of the TM and TE bands of the photonic crystal in a square array of silicon rods embedded in the air,
schematic diagram of the filter,
distribution of the refractive index along the structure,
structure meshing,
propagation and transmission for different refractive indices such as methanal (H2CO), dichloromethane (CH2Cl2) and perchlorethylene (C2Cl4).
Conclusion: In this article, we have been able to simulate, analyze and control our proposed structure with MATLAB and COMSOL software based on the finite element method. The results show that for the three volatile organic compounds, the variation of the signal is due to the wavelength of the resonance which is related to the refractive index (n). This can be seen by the small Δλ between three volatile organic compounds, which is 0.4nm between (H2CO, C2Cl4) and 2.9 nm between (CH2Cl2, H2CO). Thanks to this change, this structure can be used as sensor for the detection of toxic organic pollutants that can infect human health (16)
Aberrometry from Astronomy to Vision Science
Get PDFAberrometry is a branch from optical metrology and more directly from astronomy. Applied to the science of vision, it allows for dramatic improvements in human vision research, such as refining the visual capabilities of healthy and diseased subjects beyond physiological limits. In retinal imaging, it permits observing with very high resolution, photoreceptors allowing glimpsing an earlier diagnosis of some retinal pathologies as well as the observation and assessment of more effective treatments. They rely on the ocular wave front collection with the help of an aberrometer which allows establishing the precise and quantitative record of the various optical aberrations of the human eye, whether low or high degree. In this work, we draw our approach to apply these concepts to refractive surgery and contact lenses adaptation, to relate the changes in higher-order aberrations (HOAs) following wavefront-guided femtosecond laser-assisted (WFG FS-LASIK), and to explore the correlations between preoperative spherical equivalence (SE) and mechanisms of HOAs affecting the visual quality
Keynote for Fast Publishing by Writing Technical Note
Get PDFWriting-up of technical information is consuming time and efforts, however the exponential grow of innovations and finding should be relevantly shared by publications. Technical note (also known as innovation or technical development in some journals) is among short scientific article published by medical journals and sometime engineering journals. It is produced for describing a new technic, procedure, or development relevant for medical system. Sometimes, technical note describes the modification of an existing technics. This article presents a simple guide on writing Technical Notes and includes basic arguments as definition, appellations, and structure.