Seismic characterisation based on time-frequency spectral analysis

We present high-resolution time-frequency spectral analysis schemes to better resolve seismic images for the purpose of seismic and petroleum reservoir characterisation. Seismic characterisation is based on the physical properties of the Earth's subsurface media, and these properties are represented implicitly by seismic attributes. Because seismic traces originally presented in the time domain are non-stationary signals, for which the properties vary with time, we characterise those signals by obtaining seismic attributes which are also varying with time. Among the widely used attributes are spectral attributes calculated through time-frequency decomposition. Time-frequency spectral decomposition methods are employed to capture variations of a signal within the time-frequency domain. These decomposition methods generate a frequency vector at each time sample, referred to as the spectral component. The computed spectral component enables us to explore the additional frequency dimension which exists jointly with the original time dimension enabling localisation and characterisation of patterns within the seismic section. Conventional time-frequency decomposition methods include the continuous wavelet transform and the Wigner-Ville distribution. These methods suffer from challenges that hinder accurate interpretation when used for seismic interpretation. Continuous wavelet transform aims to decompose signals on a basis of elementary signals which have to be localised in time and frequency, but this method suffers from resolution and localisation limitations in the time-frequency spectrum. In addition to smearing, it often emerges from ill-localisation. The Wigner-Ville distribution distributes the energy of the signal over the two variables time and frequency and results in highly localised signal components. Yet, the method suffers from spurious cross-term interference due to its quadratic nature. This interference is misleading when the spectrum is used for interpretation purposes. For the specific application on seismic data the interference obscures geological features and distorts geophysical details. This thesis focuses on developing high fidelity and high-resolution time-frequency spectral decomposition methods as an extension to the existing conventional methods. These methods are then adopted as means to resolve seismic images for petroleum reservoirs. These methods are validated in terms of physics, robustness, and accurate energy localisation, using an extensive set of synthetic and real data sets including both carbonate and clastic reservoir settings. The novel contributions achieved in this thesis include developing time-frequency analysis algorithms for seismic data, allowing improved interpretation and accurate characterisation of petroleum reservoirs. The first algorithm established in this thesis is the Wigner-Ville distribution (WVD) with an additional masking filter. The standard WVD spectrum has high resolution but suffers the cross-term interference caused by multiple components in the signal. To suppress the cross-term interference, I designed a masking filter based on the spectrum of the smoothed-pseudo WVD (SP-WVD). The original SP-WVD incorporates smoothing filters in both time and frequency directions to suppress the cross-term interference, which reduces the resolution of the time-frequency spectrum. In order to overcome this side-effect, I used the SP-WVD spectrum as a reference to design a masking filter, and apply it to the standard WVD spectrum. Therefore, the mask-filtered WVD (MF-WVD) can preserve the high-resolution feature of the standard WVD while suppressing the cross-term interference as effectively as the SP-WVD. The second developed algorithm in this thesis is the synchrosqueezing wavelet transform (SWT) equipped with a directional filter. A transformation algorithm such as the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) might cause smearing in the time-frequency spectrum, i.e. the lack of localisation. The SWT attempts to improve the localisation of the time-frequency spectrum generated by the CWT. The real part of the complex SWT spectrum, after directional filtering, is capable to resolve the stratigraphic boundaries of thin layers within target reservoirs. In terms of seismic characterisation, I tested the high-resolution spectral results on a complex clastic reservoir interbedded with coal seams from the Ordos basin, northern China. I used the spectral results generated using the MF-WVD method to facilitate the interpretation of the sand distribution within the dataset. In another implementation I used the SWT spectral data results and the original seismic data together as the input to a deep convolutional neural network (dCNN), to track the horizons within a 3D volume. Using these application-based procedures, I have effectively extracted the spatial variation and the thickness of thinly layered sandstone in a coal-bearing reservoir. I also test the algorithm on a carbonate reservoir from the Tarim basin, western China. I used the spectrum generated by the synchrosqueezing wavelet transform equipped with directional filtering to characterise faults, karsts, and direct hydrocarbon indicators within the reservoir. Finally, I investigated pore-pressure prediction in carbonate layers. Pore-pressure variation generates subtle changes in the P-wave velocity of carbonate rocks. This suggests that existing empirical relations capable of predicting pore-pressure in clastic rocks are unsuitable for the prediction in carbonate rocks. I implemented the prediction based on the P-wave velocity and the wavelet transform multi-resolution analysis (WT-MRA). The WT-MRA method can unfold information within the frequency domain via decomposing the P-wave velocity. This enables us to extract and amplify hidden information embedded in the signal. Using Biot's theory, WT-MRA decomposition results can be divided into contributions from the pore-fluid and the rock framework. Therefore, I proposed a pore-pressure prediction model which is based on the pore-fluid contribution, calculated through WT-MRA, to the P-wave velocity.Open Acces

Detection of shockable heart rhythms with convolutional neural networks : Based on ECG spectrograms

Purpose Automated feature extraction combined with deep learning has had and continues to have a strong impact on the improvement and implementation of pattern recognition driven by machine learning. Systems without prior expertise about a problem but with the ability to iteratively learn strategies to solve problems, tend to outperform concepts of manual feature engineering in vari-ous fields. In ECG data analysis as well as in other medical domains, models based on manual feature extraction are tedious to develop, require scientific expertise, and are oftentimes not easily adaptive to variations of the problem to be solved. This work aims to examine automated feature extraction and classification of ECG data, specifically of shockable heart rhythms, with convolu-tional neural networks and residual neural networks. The precise and rapid determination of shockable cardiac conditions is a decisive step to improve the chances of survival for patients having a sudden cardiac arrest. Conventional, commercially available automated external defib-rillators (AEDs) deploy algorithms based on manual feature extraction. Approximately 1 out of 10 shockable conditions is not recognized by the AED. Consequently, strategies for improvement need to be explored. Methods 125 ECG recordings from four annotated cardiac arrhythmia databases (American Heart Association Database, Creighton University Tachyarrhythmia Database, MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Da-tabase, MIT-BIH Malignant Ventricular Arrhythmia Database) with a duration of 30 mins or 8 mins (Creighton University Tachyarrhythmia Database) per recording were processed. Shockable con-ditions are identified as ventricular tachycardia, ventricular fibrillation, and ventricular flutter. The 1 channel ECG recordings (modified limb lead II) were normalized to 250 Hz sampling frequency, high-pass filtered (1 Hz cutoff and 0.85 filter steepness), second order Butterworth low-pass fil-tered (30 Hz cutoff), and notch filtered at 50 Hz. Consistent wavelet transformation with 5 octaves, 20 voices per octave, and a time bandwidth product parameter of 50 was applied to generate greyscale spectrogram representations of the ECG data (pixel value range from 0 to 255). The recordings were segmented into 3 s segments. Data augmentation around the borders of shock-able episodes and along shockable episodes was carried out to create balanced datasets con-sisting of 60340 samples. 45% of samples in the balanced dataset contain shockable rhythms with more than 60% temporal prevalence within each sample. Conventional convolutional neural networks and residual neural networks with varying architectures and hyperparameter settings were trained and evaluated on balanced datasets (train/val/test: 70/15/15). The approach focused on examining a broader range of parameter settings and model architectures rather than optimiz-ing a specific configuration. The best performing model was evaluated in a 5-fold cross-validation. Exemplarily, a leave-one-subject-out cross-validation was deployed with 3 randomly chosen re-cordings, with the constraints that each subject must come from a different database and contain a different shockable condition. Results and Conclusion The best performing model was a residual neural network with 96 residual blocks. The 5-fold cross-validation results on average in an accuracy of 0.987, a sensitivity of 0.992 on shock-able rhythms, and a specificity of 0.984 for non-shockable rhythms on the test sets. The ROC AUC score is 0.998 on average. The 3-fold leave-one-subject-out cross-validation reaches on average an accuracy of 0.984, a sensitivity of 0.984, and a specificity of 0.980. The ROC AUC score reaches 0.997 on average. The analysis of misclassified segments reveals that the classi-fier performs less accurately on border segments containing a shockable and at least one non-shockable rhythm. While the test set contains 4.73% border segments, the set of misclassified samples includes 11.29% border segments. The label distributions of the test set and the set of misclassified samples show that segments annotated as “not defined” (ND) and “ventricular fibril-lation or flutter” (VF-VFL) are significantly more prevalent in the set of misclassified samples. Histogram analysis, referring to the mean pixel intensity of the spectrograms, indicates that the classifier works less accurately on spectrograms with mean pixel values below 2 (practically flat-line signals or signals with very small amplitude). The results indicate that it is possible to improve the analysis of ECG data by deploying automated feature detection combined with artificial neural networks. The methods presented in this work are not restricted to the detection of shockable cardiac arrhythmias, they likewise em-phasize the potential of machine learning in the domain of biosignal analysis and correlated med-ical data. In the next step, the approach needs to be verified on a broader database. The tech-nology can even help create more comprehensive databases of clinical ECG data by supporting automated annotation

Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications

The MAVEBA Workshop proceedings, held on a biannual basis, collect the scientific papers presented both as oral and poster contributions, during the conference. The main subjects are: development of theoretical and mechanical models as an aid to the study of main phonatory dysfunctions, as well as the biomedical engineering methods for the analysis of voice signals and images, as a support to clinical diagnosis and classification of vocal pathologies

Advanced Signal Processing in Wearable Sensors for Health Monitoring

Smart, wearables devices on a miniature scale are becoming increasingly widely available, typically in the form of smart watches and other connected devices. Consequently, devices to assist in measurements such as electroencephalography (EEG), electrocardiogram (ECG), electromyography (EMG), blood pressure (BP), photoplethysmography (PPG), heart rhythm, respiration rate, apnoea, and motion detection are becoming more available, and play a significant role in healthcare monitoring. The industry is placing great emphasis on making these devices and technologies available on smart devices such as phones and watches. Such measurements are clinically and scientifically useful for real-time monitoring, long-term care, and diagnosis and therapeutic techniques. However, a pertaining issue is that recorded data are usually noisy, contain many artefacts, and are affected by external factors such as movements and physical conditions. In order to obtain accurate and meaningful indicators, the signal has to be processed and conditioned such that the measurements are accurate and free from noise and disturbances. In this context, many researchers have utilized recent technological advances in wearable sensors and signal processing to develop smart and accurate wearable devices for clinical applications. The processing and analysis of physiological signals is a key issue for these smart wearable devices. Consequently, ongoing work in this field of study includes research on filtration, quality checking, signal transformation and decomposition, feature extraction and, most recently, machine learning-based methods

Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications

The International Workshop on Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications (MAVEBA) came into being in 1999 from the particularly felt need of sharing know-how, objectives and results between areas that until then seemed quite distinct such as bioengineering, medicine and singing. MAVEBA deals with all aspects concerning the study of the human voice with applications ranging from the newborn to the adult and elderly. Over the years the initial issues have grown and spread also in other fields of research such as occupational voice disorders, neurology, rehabilitation, image and video analysis. MAVEBA takes place every two years in Firenze, Italy. This edition celebrates twenty-two years of uninterrupted and successful research in the field of voice analysis

Towards Personalized Healthcare in Cardiac Population: The Development of a Wearable ECG Monitoring System, an ECG Lossy Compression Schema, and a ResNet-Based AF Detector

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the number one cause of death worldwide. While there is growing evidence that the atrial fibrillation (AF) has strong associations with various CVDs, this heart arrhythmia is usually diagnosed using electrocardiography (ECG) which is a risk-free, non-intrusive, and cost-efficient tool. Continuously and remotely monitoring the subjects' ECG information unlocks the potentials of prompt pre-diagnosis and timely pre-treatment of AF before the development of any life-threatening conditions/diseases. Ultimately, the CVDs associated mortality could be reduced. In this manuscript, the design and implementation of a personalized healthcare system embodying a wearable ECG device, a mobile application, and a back-end server are presented. This system continuously monitors the users' ECG information to provide personalized health warnings/feedbacks. The users are able to communicate with their paired health advisors through this system for remote diagnoses, interventions, etc. The implemented wearable ECG devices have been evaluated and showed excellent intra-consistency (CVRMS=5.5%), acceptable inter-consistency (CVRMS=12.1%), and negligible RR-interval errors (ARE<1.4%). To boost the battery life of the wearable devices, a lossy compression schema utilizing the quasi-periodic feature of ECG signals to achieve compression was proposed. Compared to the recognized schemata, it outperformed the others in terms of compression efficiency and distortion, and achieved at least 2x of CR at a certain PRD or RMSE for ECG signals from the MIT-BIH database. To enable automated AF diagnosis/screening in the proposed system, a ResNet-based AF detector was developed. For the ECG records from the 2017 PhysioNet CinC challenge, this AF detector obtained an average testing F1=85.10% and a best testing F1=87.31%, outperforming the state-of-the-art

A framework for low-complexity communication over channels with feedback

"November 1997."Also issued as Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (p. 181-185).Supported in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency. N00014-93-1-0686 Supported in part by the U.S. Department of the Navy, Office of Naval Research. N00014-96-10930 Supported by an AT&Tdoctoral fellowshipJames M. Ooi

Aerial Vehicles

This book contains 35 chapters written by experts in developing techniques for making aerial vehicles more intelligent, more reliable, more flexible in use, and safer in operation.It will also serve as an inspiration for further improvement of the design and application of aeral vehicles. The advanced techniques and research described here may also be applicable to other high-tech areas such as robotics, avionics, vetronics, and space