Electrocardiogram (ECG) is easily submerged in noise of the complex environment during remote medical treatment, and this affects the intelligent diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. Considering this situation, this paper proposes an echo state network (ESN) denoising algorithm based on recursive least square (RLS) for ECG signals. The algorithm trains the ESN through the RLS method, and can automatically learn the deep nonlinear and differentiated characteristics in the noisy ECG data, and then the network can use these characteristic to separate out clear ECG signals automatically. In the experiment, the proposed method is compared with the wavelet transform with subband dependent threshold and the S-transform method by evaluating the signal-to-noise ratio and root mean square error. Experimental results show that the denoising accuracy is better and the low frequency component of the signal is well preserved. This method can effectively filter out complex noise and effectively preserve the effective information of ECG signals, which lays a foundation for the recognition of ECG signal feature waveform and the intelligent diagnosis of cardiovascular disease.
An in-depth understanding of the mechanism of lower extremity muscle coordination during walking is the key to improving the efficacy of gait rehabilitation in patients with neuromuscular dysfunction. This paper investigates the effect of changes in walking speed on lower extremity muscle synergy patterns and muscle functional networks. Eight healthy subjects were recruited to perform walking tasks on a treadmill at three different speeds, and the surface electromyographic signals (sEMG) of eight muscles of the right lower limb were collected synchronously. The non-negative matrix factorization (NNMF) method was used to extract muscle synergy patterns, the mutual information (MI) method was used to construct the alpha frequency band (8–13 Hz), beta frequency band (14–30 Hz) and gamma frequency band (31–60 Hz) muscle functional network, and complex network analysis methods were introduced to quantify the differences between different networks. Muscle synergy analysis extracted 5 muscle synergy patterns, and changes in walking speed did not change the number of muscle synergy, but resulted in changes in muscle weights. Muscle network analysis found that at the same speed, high-frequency bands have lower global efficiency and clustering coefficients. As walking speed increased, the strength of connections between local muscles also increased. The results show that there are different muscle synergy patterns and muscle function networks in different walking speeds. This study provides a new perspective for exploring the mechanism of muscle coordination at different walking speeds, and is expected to provide theoretical support for the evaluation of gait function in patients with neuromuscular dysfunction.
The segmentation of the intracoronary optical coherence tomography (OCT) images is the basis of the plaque recognition, and it is important to the following plaque feature analysis, vulnerable plaque recognition and further coronary disease aided diagnosis. This paper proposes an algorithm about multi region plaque segmentation based on kernel graph cuts model that realizes accurate segmentation of fibrous, calcium and lipid pool plaques in coronary OCT image, while boundary information has been well reserved. We segmented 20 coronary images with typical plaques in our experiment, and compared the plaque regions segmented by this algorithm to the plaque regions obtained by doctor's manual segmentation. The results showed that our algorithm is accurate to segment the plaque regions. This work has demonstrated that it can be used for reducing doctors' working time on segmenting plaque significantly, reduce subjectivity and differences between different doctors, assist clinician's diagnosis and treatment of coronary artery disease.
In recent years, optical coherence tomography (OCT) has developed into a popular coronary imaging technology at home and abroad. The segmentation of plaque regions in coronary OCT images has great significance for vulnerable plaque recognition and research. In this paper, a new algorithm based on K-means clustering and improved random walk is proposed and Semi-automated segmentation of calcified plaque, fibrotic plaque and lipid pool was achieved. And the weight function of random walk is improved. The distance between the edges of pixels in the image and the seed points is added to the definition of the weight function. It increases the weak edge weights and prevent over-segmentation. Based on the above methods, the OCT images of 9 coronary atherosclerotic patients were selected for plaque segmentation. By contrasting the doctor’s manual segmentation results with this method, it was proved that this method had good robustness and accuracy. It is hoped that this method can be helpful for the clinical diagnosis of coronary heart disease.
Muscle fatigue has widespread application in the field of rehabilitation medicine. The paper studies the muscle fatigue using surface electromyogram (sEMG) in the background of rehabilitation training system. The sEMG and ventilatory threshold of vastus lateralis, rectus femoris and erector spinae are collected synchronously and the electromyogram fatigue threshold (EMGFT) of different sEMG was analyzed by increasing load cycling experiments of 10 healthy subjects. This paper also analyzes the effect of isotonic and isometric contraction on EMGFT. Results showed that the appeared time of EMGFT was earlier than that of ventilatory threshold in the incremental load cycling. While the differences were subtle and EMGFT was verified to be effective. EMGFT has been proven effective for different muscle contraction by comparing the EMGFT of vastus lateralis and erector spinae. EMGFT could be used to keep muscle injuries from overtraining in the process of rehabilitation. Therefore, EMGFT has a great significance for femoral shaft fractures’s fatigue monitoring in rehabilitation training.
Inferior myocardial infarction is an acute ischemic heart disease with high mortality, which is easy to induce life-threatening complications such as arrhythmia, heart failure and cardiogenic shock. Therefore, it is of great clinical value to carry out accurate and efficient early diagnosis of inferior myocardial infarction. Electrocardiogram is the most sensitive means for early diagnosis of inferior myocardial infarction. This paper proposes a method for detecting inferior myocardial infarction based on densely connected convolutional neural network. The method uses the original electrocardiogram (ECG) signals of serially connected Ⅱ, Ⅲ and aVF leads as the input of the model and extracts the robust features of the ECG signals by using the scale invariance of the convolutional layers. The characteristic transmission of ECG signals is enhanced by the dense connectivity between different layers, so that the network can automatically learn the effective features with strong robustness and high recognition, so as to achieve accurate detection of inferior myocardial infarction. The Physikalisch Technische Bundesanstalt diagnosis public ECG database was used for verification. The accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of the model reached 99.95%, 100% and 99.90%, respectively. The accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of the model are also over 99% even though the noise exists. Based on the results of this study, it is expected that the method can be introduced in the clinical environment to help doctors quickly diagnose inferior myocardial infarction in the future.
Lung nodules are the main manifestation of early lung cancer. So accurate detection of lung nodules is of great significance for early diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer. However, the rapid and accurate detection of pulmonary nodules is a challenging task due to the complex background, large detection range of pulmonary computed tomography (CT) images and the different sizes and shapes of pulmonary nodules. Therefore, this paper proposes a multi-scale feature fusion algorithm for the automatic detection of pulmonary nodules to achieve accurate detection of pulmonary nodules. Firstly, a three-layer modular lung nodule detection model was designed on the deep convolutional network (VGG16) for large-scale image recognition. The first-tier module of the network is used to extract the features of pulmonary nodules in CT images and roughly estimate the location of pulmonary nodules. Then the second-tier module of the network is used to fuse multi-scale image features to further enhance the details of pulmonary nodules. The third-tier module of the network was fused to analyze the features of the first-tier and the second-tier module of the network, and the candidate box of pulmonary nodules in multi-scale was obtained. Finally, the candidate box of pulmonary nodules under multi-scale was analyzed with the method of non-maximum suppression, and the final location of pulmonary nodules was obtained. The algorithm is validated by the data of pulmonary nodules on LIDC-IDRI common data set. The average detection accuracy is 90.9%.
In order to solve the problem that the early onset of paroxysmal atrial fibrillation is very short and difficult to detect, a detection algorithm based on sparse coding of Riemannian manifolds is proposed. The proposed method takes into account that the nonlinear manifold geometry is closer to the real feature space structure, and the computational covariance matrix is used to characterize the heart rate variability (RR interval variation), so that the data is in the Riemannian manifold space. Sparse coding is applied to the manifold, and each covariance matrix is represented as a sparse linear combination of Riemann dictionary atoms. The sparse reconstruction loss is defined by the affine invariant Riemannian metric, and the Riemann dictionary is learned by iterative method. Compared with the existing methods, this method used shorter heart rate variability signal, the calculation was simple and had no dependence on the parameters, and the better prediction accuracy was obtained. The final classification on MIT-BIH AF database resulted in a sensitivity of 99.34%, a specificity of 95.41% and an accuracy of 97.45%. At the same time, a specificity of 95.18% was realized in MIT-BIH NSR database. The high precision paroxysmal atrial fibrillation detection algorithm proposed in this paper has a potential application prospect in the long-term monitoring of wearable devices.
Early accurate detection of inferior myocardial infarction is an important way to reduce the mortality from inferior myocardial infarction. Regrading the existing problems in the detection of inferior myocardial infarction, complex model structures and redundant features, this paper proposed a novel inferior myocardial infarction detection algorithm. Firstly, based on the clinic pathological information, the peak and area features of QRS and ST-T wavebands as well as the slope feature of ST waveband were extracted from electrocardiogram (ECG) signals leads Ⅱ, Ⅲ and aVF. In addition, according to individual features and the dispersion between them, we applied genetic algorithm to make judgement and then input the feature with larger degree into support vector machine (SVM) to realize the accurate detection of inferior myocardial infarction. The proposed method in this paper was verified by Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) diagnostic electrocardio signal database and the accuracy rate was up to 98.33%. Conforming to the clinical diagnosis and the characteristics of specific changes in inferior myocardial infarction ECG signal, the proposed method can effectively make precise detection of inferior myocardial infarction by morphological features, and therefore is suitable to be applied in portable devices development for clinical promotion.
The functional coupling between motor cortex and effector muscles during autonomic movement can be quantified by calculating the coupling between electroencephalogram (EEG) signal and surface electromyography (sEMG) signal. The maximal information coefficient (MIC) algorithm has been proved to be effective in quantifying the coupling relationship between neural signals, but it also has the problem of time-consuming calculations in actual use. To solve this problem, an improved MIC algorithm was proposed based on the efficient clustering characteristics of K-means ++ algorithm to accurately detect the coupling strength between nonlinear time series. Simulation results showed that the improved MIC algorithm proposed in this paper can capture the coupling relationship between nonlinear time series quickly and accurately under different noise levels. The results of right dorsiflexion experiments in stroke patients showed that the improved method could accurately capture the coupling strength of EEG signal and sEMG signal in the specific frequency band. Compared with the healthy controls, the functional corticomuscular coupling (FCMC) in beta (14~30 Hz) and gamma band (31~45 Hz) were significantly weaker in stroke patients, and the beta-band MIC values were positively correlated with the Fugl-Meyers assessment (FMA) scale scores. The method proposed in this study is hopeful to be a new method for quantitative assessment of motor function for stroke patients.