46,678 research outputs found
Estimating Carotid Pulse and Breathing Rate from Near-infrared Video of the Neck
Objective: Non-contact physiological measurement is a growing research area
that allows capturing vital signs such as heart rate (HR) and breathing rate
(BR) comfortably and unobtrusively with remote devices. However, most of the
approaches work only in bright environments in which subtle
photoplethysmographic and ballistocardiographic signals can be easily analyzed
and/or require expensive and custom hardware to perform the measurements.
Approach: This work introduces a low-cost method to measure subtle motions
associated with the carotid pulse and breathing movement from the neck using
near-infrared (NIR) video imaging. A skin reflection model of the neck was
established to provide a theoretical foundation for the method. In particular,
the method relies on template matching for neck detection, Principal Component
Analysis for feature extraction, and Hidden Markov Models for data smoothing.
Main Results: We compared the estimated HR and BR measures with ones provided
by an FDA-cleared device in a 12-participant laboratory study: the estimates
achieved a mean absolute error of 0.36 beats per minute and 0.24 breaths per
minute under both bright and dark lighting.
Significance: This work advances the possibilities of non-contact
physiological measurement in real-life conditions in which environmental
illumination is limited and in which the face of the person is not readily
available or needs to be protected. Due to the increasing availability of NIR
imaging devices, the described methods are readily scalable.Comment: 21 pages, 15 figure
Twente Optical Perfusion Camera: system overview and performance for video rate laser Doppler perfusion imaging
We present the Twente Optical Perfusion Camera (TOPCam), a novel laser Doppler Perfusion Imager based on CMOS technology. The tissue under investigation is illuminated and the resulting dynamic speckle pattern is recorded with a high speed CMOS camera. Based on an overall analysis of the signal-to-noise ratio of CMOS cameras, we have selected the camera which best fits our requirements. We applied a pixel-by-pixel noise correction to minimize the influence of noise in the perfusion images. We can achieve a frame rate of 0.2 fps for a perfusion image of 128×128 pixels (imaged tissue area of 7×7 cm2) if the data is analyzed online. If the analysis of the data is performed offline, we can achieve a frame rate of 26 fps for a duration of 3.9 seconds. By reducing the imaging size to 128×16 pixels, this frame rate can be achieved for up to half a minute. We show the fast imaging capabilities of the system in order of increasing perfusion frame rate. First the increase of skin perfusion after application of capsicum cream, and the perfusion during an occlusion-reperfusion procedure at the fastest frame rate allowed with online analysis is shown. With the highest frame rate allowed with offline analysis, the skin perfusion revealing the heart beat and the perfusion during an occlusion-reperfusion procedure is presented. Hence we have achieved video rate laser Doppler perfusion imaging
Universal Arduino-based experimenting system to support teaching of natural sciences
The rapid evolution of intelligent electronic devices makes information
technology, computer science and electronics strongly related to the teaching
of natural sciences. Today almost everybody has a smart phone that can convert
light, temperature, movement, sound to numbers, therefore all these can be
processed, analysed, displayed, stored, shared by software applications. The
fundamental question is how education can follow this knowledge and how can
education take its advantages. Components and methods of modern technology are
available for education also, teachers and students can play with parts and
tools which were previously used only by engineers. A good example is the very
popular Arduino board which is practically an industrial microcontroller whose
pins are wired to easy-to-use connectors on a printed circuit board. In this
paper we show a universal system which we have developed for the Arduino
platform to support experimenting and understanding of the most fundamental
principles of the operation of modern devices. We show our related educational
concept and discuss the most important features of the system. Open source
hardware and software are available and we provide a number of video tutorials
as well
Video Compressive Sensing for Dynamic MRI
We present a video compressive sensing framework, termed kt-CSLDS, to
accelerate the image acquisition process of dynamic magnetic resonance imaging
(MRI). We are inspired by a state-of-the-art model for video compressive
sensing that utilizes a linear dynamical system (LDS) to model the motion
manifold. Given compressive measurements, the state sequence of an LDS can be
first estimated using system identification techniques. We then reconstruct the
observation matrix using a joint structured sparsity assumption. In particular,
we minimize an objective function with a mixture of wavelet sparsity and joint
sparsity within the observation matrix. We derive an efficient convex
optimization algorithm through alternating direction method of multipliers
(ADMM), and provide a theoretical guarantee for global convergence. We
demonstrate the performance of our approach for video compressive sensing, in
terms of reconstruction accuracy. We also investigate the impact of various
sampling strategies. We apply this framework to accelerate the acquisition
process of dynamic MRI and show it achieves the best reconstruction accuracy
with the least computational time compared with existing algorithms in the
literature.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figure
A perpetual switching system in pulmonary capillaries
Of the 300 billion capillaries in the human lung, a small fraction meet normal oxygen requirements at rest, with the remainder forming a large reserve. The maximum oxygen demands of the acute stress response require that the reserve capillaries are rapidly recruited. To remain primed for emergencies, the normal cardiac output must be parceled throughout the capillary bed to maintain low opening pressures. The flow-distributing system requires complex switching. Because the pulmonary microcirculation contains contractile machinery, one hypothesis posits an active switching system. The opposing hypothesis is based on passive switching that requires no regulation. Both hypotheses were tested ex vivo in canine lung lobes. The lobes were perfused first with autologous blood, and capillary switching patterns were recorded by videomicroscopy. Next, the vasculature of the lobes was saline flushed, fixed by glutaraldehyde perfusion, flushed again, and then reperfused with the original, unfixed blood. Flow patterns through the same capillaries were recorded again. The 16-min-long videos were divided into 4-s increments. Each capillary segment was recorded as being perfused if at least one red blood cell crossed the entire segment. Otherwise it was recorded as unperfused. These binary measurements were made manually for each segment during every 4 s throughout the 16-min recordings of the fresh and fixed capillaries (>60,000 measurements). Unexpectedly, the switching patterns did not change after fixation. We conclude that the pulmonary capillaries can remain primed for emergencies without requiring regulation: no detectors, no feedback loops, and no effectors-a rare system in biology. NEW & NOTEWORTHY The fluctuating flow patterns of red blood cells within the pulmonary capillary networks have been assumed to be actively controlled within the pulmonary microcirculation. Here we show that the capillary flow switching patterns in the same network are the same whether the lungs are fresh or fixed. This unexpected observation can be successfully explained by a new model of pulmonary capillary flow based on chaos theory and fractal mathematics
Expert-Augmented Machine Learning
Machine Learning is proving invaluable across disciplines. However, its
success is often limited by the quality and quantity of available data, while
its adoption by the level of trust that models afford users. Human vs. machine
performance is commonly compared empirically to decide whether a certain task
should be performed by a computer or an expert. In reality, the optimal
learning strategy may involve combining the complementary strengths of man and
machine. Here we present Expert-Augmented Machine Learning (EAML), an automated
method that guides the extraction of expert knowledge and its integration into
machine-learned models. We use a large dataset of intensive care patient data
to predict mortality and show that we can extract expert knowledge using an
online platform, help reveal hidden confounders, improve generalizability on a
different population and learn using less data. EAML presents a novel framework
for high performance and dependable machine learning in critical applications
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