COVID-19 Diagnosis Using Spectral and Statistical Analysis of Cough Recordings Based on the Combination of SVD and DWT

تستخدم الإشارات الصوتية التي يولدها جسم الإنسان بشكل روتيني من قبل التخصصين في البحوث والتطبيقات الصحية  للمساعدة في تشخيص بعض  الامراض أو تقييم تقدم المرض. وبالنظر إلى التقنيات الجديدة ، من الممكن في الوقت الحاضر جمع الأصوات التي يولدها الإنسان ، مثل السعال. ويمكن بعد ذلك اعتماد تقنيات التعلم الآلي المستندة إلى الصوت من أجل التحليل التلقائي للبيانات التي تم جمعها مما يوفر معلومات قيمة غنية من إشارة السعال واستخراج الميزات الفعالة من فترة زمنية محدودة الطول تتغير كدالة للوقت. في هذا البحث يتم اقتراح وتقديم خوارزمية  للكشف عن COVID-19 وتشخيصه من خلال معالجة السعال الذي يتم جمعه من المرضى الذين يعانون من الأعراض الأكثر شيوعًا لهذا الوباء. تعتمد الطريقة المقترحة على اعتماد مزيج من تحليل القيمة المفردة (SVD) وتحويل المويجات المنفصل (DWT).  وقد أدى الجمع بين هاتين التقنيتين لمعالجة الإشارات إلى اتباع نهج جيد للتعرف على السعال ، حيث يولد ويستخدم الحد الأدنى من الميزات الفعالة. وفي هذه الخوارزمية المقترحة يتم تطبيق الترددات المتوسطة (mean and median)، والمعروفة بأنها أكثر الميزات المفيدة في مجال التردد ، لإنشاء مقياس إحصائي فعال لمقارنة النتائج. بالإضافة إلى الحصول على معدل كشف وتمييز عاليين ، تتميز الخوارزمية المقترحة بكفاءتها حيث يتم تحقيق تخفيض 200 مرة، من حيث عدد العمليات. على الرغم من حقيقة أن أعراض الأشخاص المصابين وغير المصابين في الدراسة بها الكثير من أوجه التشابه ، فإن نتائج التشخيص التي تم الحصول عليها من تطبيق نهجنا تُظهر معدل تشخيص مرتفعًا، والذي تم إثباته من خلال مطابقتها مع اختبارات PCR ذات الصلة. نعتقد أنه يمكن تحقيق أداء أفضل من خلال توسيع مجموعة البيانات ، مع تضمين الأشخاص الأصحاء.Healthcare professionals routinely use audio signals, generated by the human body, to help diagnose disease or assess its progression. With new technologies, it is now possible to collect human-generated sounds, such as coughing. Audio-based machine learning technologies can be adopted for automatic analysis of collected data. Valuable and rich information can be obtained from the cough signal and extracting effective characteristics from a finite duration time interval that changes as a function of time. This article presents a proposed approach to the detection and diagnosis of COVID-19 through the processing of cough collected from patients suffering from the most common symptoms of this pandemic. The proposed method is based on adopting a combination of Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). The combination of these two signal processing techniques is gaining lots of interest in the field of speaker and speech recognition. As a cough recognition approach, we found it well-performing, as it generates and utilizes an efficient minimum number of features. Mean and median frequencies, which are known to be the most useful features in the frequency domain, are applied to generate an effective statistical measure to compare the results. The hybrid structure of DWT and SVD, adopted in this approach adds to its efficiency, where a 200 times reduction, in terms of the number of operations, is achieved. Despite the fact that symptoms of the infected and non-infected people used in the study are having lots of similarities, diagnosis results obtained from the application of the proposed approach show high diagnosis rate, which is proved through the matching with relevant PCR tests.  The proposed approach is open for more improvements with its performance further assured by enlarging the dataset, while including healthy people

A survey of voice pathology surveillance systems based on internet of things and machine learning algorithms

The incorporation of the cloud technology with the Internet of Things (IoT) is significant in order to obtain better performance for a seamless, continuous, and ubiquitous framework. IoT has many applications in the healthcare sector, one of these applications is voice pathology monitoring. Unfortunately, voice pathology has not gained much attention, where there is an urgent need in this area due to the shortage of research and diagnosis of lethal diseases. Most of the researchers are focusing on the voice pathology and their finding is only to differentiating either the voice is normal (healthy) or pathological voice, where there is a lack of the current studies for detecting a certain disease such as laryngeal cancer. In this paper, we present an extensive review of the state-of-the-art techniques and studies of IoT frameworks and machine learning algorithms used in the healthcare in general and in the voice pathology surveillance systems in particular. Furthermore, this paper also presents applications, challenges and key issues of both IoT and machine learning algorithms in the healthcare. Finally, this paper highlights some open issues of IoT in healthcare that warrant further research and investigation in order to present an easy, comfortable and effective diagnosis and treatment of disease for both patients and doctors

Time series segmentation based on stationarity analysis to improve new samples prediction

A wide range of applications based on sequential data, named time series, have become increasingly popular in recent years, mainly those based on the Internet of Things (IoT). Several different machine learning algorithms exploit the patterns extracted from sequential data to support multiple tasks. However, this data can suffer from unreliable readings that can lead to low accuracy models due to the low-quality training sets available. Detecting the change point between high representative segments is an important ally to find and thread biased subsequences. By constructing a framework based on the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test for data stationarity, two proposals to automatically segment subsequences in a time series were developed. The former proposal, called Change Detector segmentation, relies on change detection methods of data stream mining. The latter, called ADF-based segmentation, is constructed on a new change detector derived from the ADF test only. Experiments over real-file IoT databases and benchmarks showed the improvement provided by our proposals for prediction tasks with traditional Autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and Deep Learning (Long short-term memory and Temporal Convolutional Networks) methods. Results obtained by the Long short-term memory predictive model reduced the relative prediction error from 1 to 0.67, compared to time series without segmentation

Acoustic investigation of speech pathologies based on the discriminative paraconsistent machine (DPM)

Background Voice disorders are related to both modest and severe health problems, including discomfort, pain, difficulty speaking, dysphagia and also cancer. Widely adopted worldwide, the combined invasive and subjective diagnosis of voice disorders is troublesome and error-prone. Contrarily, acoustic-based digital assessment allows for a non-intrusive and objective examination, stimulating the applications of computer-based tools. Objective Consequently, this work describes a novel algorithm to investigate speech pathologies from the sounds of sustained vowels, particularly exploring a potential gap: the classification of co-existent issues for which the major phonic symptom is the same, implying in similar inter-class features. Method By using the concepts of signal energy (SE), zero-crossing rates (ZCRs) and signal entropy (SH), which provide a joint time-frequency-information map, the proposed approach classifies voice signals based on the discriminative paraconsistent machine (DPM), allowing for the application of paraconsistency to treat indefinitions and contradictions. Results An accuracy level of 95% was obtained under a subset of voices from the Saarbrucken voice database (SVD), with just a modest training. In complement, the proposed approach offers wider possibilities in contrast to current state-of-the-art systems, allowing for the inputs to be mapped into the paraconsistent plane in such a way that intermediary states can be found. Conclusion Different from current algorithms, our technique focuses on a particular problem in the field of speech pathology detection (SPD), not yet explored in detail, proposing a way to successfully solve it. Furthermore, the results we obtained stimulate broaden studies involving speech data inconsistencies whilst providing a valid contributio

Políticas de Copyright de Publicações Científicas em Repositórios Institucionais: O Caso do INESC TEC

A progressiva transformação das práticas científicas, impulsionada pelo desenvolvimento das novas Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TIC), têm possibilitado aumentar o acesso à informação, caminhando gradualmente para uma abertura do ciclo de pesquisa. Isto permitirá resolver a longo prazo uma adversidade que se tem colocado aos investigadores, que passa pela existência de barreiras que limitam as condições de acesso, sejam estas geográficas ou financeiras. Apesar da produção científica ser dominada, maioritariamente, por grandes editoras comerciais, estando sujeita às regras por estas impostas, o Movimento do Acesso Aberto cuja primeira declaração pública, a Declaração de Budapeste (BOAI), é de 2002, vem propor alterações significativas que beneficiam os autores e os leitores. Este Movimento vem a ganhar importância em Portugal desde 2003, com a constituição do primeiro repositório institucional a nível nacional. Os repositórios institucionais surgiram como uma ferramenta de divulgação da produção científica de uma instituição, com o intuito de permitir abrir aos resultados da investigação, quer antes da publicação e do próprio processo de arbitragem (preprint), quer depois (postprint), e, consequentemente, aumentar a visibilidade do trabalho desenvolvido por um investigador e a respetiva instituição. O estudo apresentado, que passou por uma análise das políticas de copyright das publicações científicas mais relevantes do INESC TEC, permitiu não só perceber que as editoras adotam cada vez mais políticas que possibilitam o auto-arquivo das publicações em repositórios institucionais, como também que existe todo um trabalho de sensibilização a percorrer, não só para os investigadores, como para a instituição e toda a sociedade. A produção de um conjunto de recomendações, que passam pela implementação de uma política institucional que incentive o auto-arquivo das publicações desenvolvidas no âmbito institucional no repositório, serve como mote para uma maior valorização da produção científica do INESC TEC.The progressive transformation of scientific practices, driven by the development of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which made it possible to increase access to information, gradually moving towards an opening of the research cycle. This opening makes it possible to resolve, in the long term, the adversity that has been placed on researchers, which involves the existence of barriers that limit access conditions, whether geographical or financial. Although large commercial publishers predominantly dominate scientific production and subject it to the rules imposed by them, the Open Access movement whose first public declaration, the Budapest Declaration (BOAI), was in 2002, proposes significant changes that benefit the authors and the readers. This Movement has gained importance in Portugal since 2003, with the constitution of the first institutional repository at the national level. Institutional repositories have emerged as a tool for disseminating the scientific production of an institution to open the results of the research, both before publication and the preprint process and postprint, increase the visibility of work done by an investigator and his or her institution. The present study, which underwent an analysis of the copyright policies of INESC TEC most relevant scientific publications, allowed not only to realize that publishers are increasingly adopting policies that make it possible to self-archive publications in institutional repositories, all the work of raising awareness, not only for researchers but also for the institution and the whole society. The production of a set of recommendations, which go through the implementation of an institutional policy that encourages the self-archiving of the publications developed in the institutional scope in the repository, serves as a motto for a greater appreciation of the scientific production of INESC TEC