Personalized Health Monitoring Using Evolvable Block-based Neural Networks

This dissertation presents personalized health monitoring using evolvable block-based neural networks. Personalized health monitoring plays an increasingly important role in modern society as the population enjoys longer life. Personalization in health monitoring considers physiological variations brought by temporal, personal or environmental differences, and demands solutions capable to reconfigure and adapt to specific requirements. Block-based neural networks (BbNNs) consist of 2-D arrays of modular basic blocks that can be easily implemented using reconfigurable digital hardware such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that allow on-line partial reorganization. The modular structure of BbNNs enables easy expansion in size by adding more blocks. A computationally efficient evolutionary algorithm is developed that simultaneously optimizes structure and weights of BbNNs. This evolutionary algorithm increases optimization speed by integrating a local search operator. An adaptive rate update scheme removing manual tuning of operator rates enhances the fitness trend compared to pre-determined fixed rates. A fitness scaling with generalized disruptive pressure reduces the possibility of premature convergence. The BbNN platform promises an evolvable solution that changes structures and parameters for personalized health monitoring. A BbNN evolved with the proposed evolutionary algorithm using the Hermite transform coefficients and a time interval between two neighboring R peaks of ECG signal, provides a patient-specific ECG heartbeat classification system. Experimental results using the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database demonstrate a potential for significant performance enhancements over other major techniques

Precision medicine and artificial intelligence : a pilot study on deep learning for hypoglycemic events detection based on ECG

Tracking the fluctuations in blood glucose levels is important for healthy subjects and crucial diabetic patients. Tight glucose monitoring reduces the risk of hypoglycemia, which can result in a series of complications, especially in diabetic patients, such as confusion, irritability, seizure and can even be fatal in specific conditions. Hypoglycemia affects the electrophysiology of the heart. However, due to strong inter-subject heterogeneity, previous studies based on a cohort of subjects failed to deploy electrocardiogram (ECG)-based hypoglycemic detection systems reliably. The current study used personalised medicine approach and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automatically detect nocturnal hypoglycemia using a few heartbeats of raw ECG signal recorded with non-invasive, wearable devices, in healthy individuals, monitored 24 hours for 14 consecutive days. Additionally, we present a visualisation method enabling clinicians to visualise which part of the ECG signal (e.g., T-wave, ST-interval) is significantly associated with the hypoglycemic event in each subject, overcoming the intelligibility problem of deep-learning methods. These results advance the feasibility of a real-time, non-invasive hypoglycemia alarming system using short excerpts of ECG signal

Precision medicine and artificial intelligence : a pilot study on deep learning for hypoglycemic events detection based on ECG

Tracking the fluctuations in blood glucose levels is important for healthy subjects and crucial diabetic patients. Tight glucose monitoring reduces the risk of hypoglycemia, which can result in a series of complications, especially in diabetic patients, such as confusion, irritability, seizure and can even be fatal in specific conditions. Hypoglycemia affects the electrophysiology of the heart. However, due to strong inter-subject heterogeneity, previous studies based on a cohort of subjects failed to deploy electrocardiogram (ECG)-based hypoglycemic detection systems reliably. The current study used personalised medicine approach and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automatically detect nocturnal hypoglycemia using a few heartbeats of raw ECG signal recorded with non-invasive, wearable devices, in healthy individuals, monitored 24 hours for 14 consecutive days. Additionally, we present a visualisation method enabling clinicians to visualise which part of the ECG signal (e.g., T-wave, ST-interval) is significantly associated with the hypoglycemic event in each subject, overcoming the intelligibility problem of deep-learning methods. These results advance the feasibility of a real-time, non-invasive hypoglycemia alarming system using short excerpts of ECG signal

Personalized Monitoring and Advance Warning System for Cardiac Arrhythmias

Each year more than 7 million people die from cardiac arrhythmias. Yet no robust solution exists today to detect such heart anomalies right at the moment they occur. The purpose of this study was to design a personalized health monitoring system that can detect early occurrences of arrhythmias from an individual's electrocardiogram (ECG) signal. We first modelled the common causes of arrhythmias in the signal domain as a degradation of normal ECG beats to abnormal beats. Using the degradation models, we performed abnormal beat synthesis which created potential abnormal beats from the average normal beat of the individual. Finally, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) was trained using real normal and synthesized abnormal beats. As a personalized classifier, the trained CNN can monitor ECG beats in real time for arrhythmia detection. Over 34 patients' ECG records with a total of 63,341 ECG beats from the MIT-BIH arrhythmia benchmark database, we have shown that the probability of detecting one or more abnormal ECG beats among the first three occurrences is higher than 99.4% with a very low false-alarm rate. 1 2017 The Author(s).Scopu

Patient-adapted and inter-patient ecg classification using neural network and gradient boosting

Heart disease diagnosis is an important non-invasive technique. Therefore, there exists an effort to increase the accuracy of arrhythmia classification based on ECG signals. In this work, we present a novel approach of heart arrhythmia detection. The model consists of two parts. The first part extracts important features from raw ECG signal using Auto-Encoder Neural Network. Extracted features obtained by Auto-Encoder represent an input for the second part of the model, the Gradient Boosting and Feedforward Neural Network classifiers. For comparison purposes, we evaluated our approach by using MIT-BIH ECG database and also following recommendations of the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) for ECG class labeling. We divided our experiment into two scenarios. The first scenario represents the classification task for the patient-adapted paradigm and the second one was dedicated to the inter-patient paradigm. We compared the measured results to the state-of-the-art methods and it shows that our method outperforms the state-of-the art methods in the Ventricular Ectopic (VEB) class for both paradigms and Supraventricular Ectopic (SVEB) class in the inter-patient paradigm.Web of Science28325424

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

Wavelet-Based Kernel Construction for Heart Disease Classification

© 2019 ADVANCES IN ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONIC ENGINEERINGHeart disease classification plays an important role in clinical diagnoses. The performance improvement of an Electrocardiogram classifier is therefore of great relevance, but it is a challenging task too. This paper proposes a novel classification algorithm using the kernel method. A kernel is constructed based on wavelet coefficients of heartbeat signals for a classifier with high performance. In particular, a wavelet packet decomposition algorithm is applied to heartbeat signals to obtain the Approximation and Detail coefficients, which are used to calculate the parameters of the kernel. A principal component analysis algorithm with the wavelet-based kernel is employed to choose the main features of the heartbeat signals for the input of the classifier. In addition, a neural network with three hidden layers in the classifier is utilized for classifying five types of heart disease. The electrocardiogram signals in nine patients obtained from the MIT-BIH database are used to test the proposed classifier. In order to evaluate the performance of the classifier, a multi-class confusion matrix is applied to produce the performance indexes, including the Accuracy, Recall, Precision, and F1 score. The experimental results show that the proposed method gives good results for the classification of the five mentioned types of heart disease.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio