Brain status modeling with non-negative projective dictionary learning

Accurate prediction of individuals’ brain age is critical to establish a baseline for normal brain development. This study proposes to model brain development with a novel non-negative projective dictionary learning (NPDL) approach, which learns a discriminative representation of multi-modal neuroimaging data for predicting brain age. Our approach encodes the variability of subjects in different age groups using separate dictionaries, projecting features into a low-dimensional manifold such that information is preserved only for the corresponding age group. The proposed framework improves upon previous discriminative dictionary learning methods by inc

Labeled projective dictionary pair learning: application to handwritten numbers recognition

Dictionary learning was introduced for sparse image representation. Today, it is a cornerstone of image classification. We propose a novel dictionary learning method to recognise images of handwritten numbers. Our focus is to maximise the sparse-representation and discrimination power of the class-specific dictionaries. We, for the first time, adopt a new feature space, i.e., histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), to generate dictionary columns (atoms). The HOG features robustly describe fine details of hand-writings. We design an objective function followed by a minimisation technique to simultaneously incorporate these features. The proposed cost function benefits from a novel class-label penalty term constraining the associated minimisation approach to obtain class-specific dictionaries. The results of applying the proposed method on various handwritten image databases in three different languages show enhanced classification performance (~98%) compared to other relevant methods. Moreover, we show that combination of HOG features with dictionary learning enhances the accuracy by 11% compared to when raw data are used. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves comparable results to that of existing deep learning models under the same experimental conditions but with a fraction of parameters

Recent Developments in Smart Healthcare

Medicine is undergoing a sector-wide transformation thanks to the advances in computing and networking technologies. Healthcare is changing from reactive and hospital-centered to preventive and personalized, from disease focused to well-being centered. In essence, the healthcare systems, as well as fundamental medicine research, are becoming smarter. We anticipate significant improvements in areas ranging from molecular genomics and proteomics to decision support for healthcare professionals through big data analytics, to support behavior changes through technology-enabled self-management, and social and motivational support. Furthermore, with smart technologies, healthcare delivery could also be made more efficient, higher quality, and lower cost. In this special issue, we received a total 45 submissions and accepted 19 outstanding papers that roughly span across several interesting topics on smart healthcare, including public health, health information technology (Health IT), and smart medicine