Justified granulation aided noninvasive liver fibrosis classification system

According to the World Health Organization 130-150 million (according to WHO) of people globally are chronically infected with hepatitis C virus. The virus is responsible for chronic hepatitis that ultimately may cause liver cirrhosis and death. The disease is progressive, however antiviral treatment may slow down or stop its development. Therefore, it is important to estimate the severity of liver fibrosis for diagnostic, therapeutic and prognostic purposes. Liver biopsy provides a high accuracy diagnosis, however it is painful and invasive procedure. Recently, we witness an outburst of non-invasive tests (biological and physical ones) aiming to define severity of liver fibrosis, but commonly used FibroTest®, according to an independent research, in some cases may have accuracy lower than 50 %. In this paper a data mining and classification technique is proposed to determine the stage of liver fibrosis using easily accessible laboratory data. Methods: Research was carried out on archival records of routine laboratory blood tests (morphology, coagulation, biochemistry, protein electrophoresis) and histopathology records of liver biopsy as a reference value. As a result, the granular model was proposed, that contains a series of intervals representing influence of separate blood attributes on liver fibrosis stage. The model determines final diagnosis for a patient using aggregation method and voting procedure. The proposed solution is robust to missing or corrupted data. Results: The results were obtained on data from 290 patients with hepatitis C virus collected over 6 years. The model has been validated using training and test data. The overall accuracy of the solution is equal to 67.9 %. The intermediate liver fibrosis stages are hard to distinguish, due to effectiveness of biopsy itself. Additionally, the method was verified against dataset obtained from 365 patients with liver disease of various etiologies. The model proved to be robust to new data. What is worth mentioning, the error rate in misclassification of the first stage and the last stage is below 6.5 % for all analyzed datasets. Conclusions: The proposed system supports the physician and defines the stage of liver fibrosis in chronic hepatitis C. The biggest advantage of the solution is a human-centric approach using intervals, which can be verified by a specialist, before giving the final decision. Moreover, it is robust to missing data. The system can be used as a powerful support tool for diagnosis in real treatmen

Fully Connected Neural Networks Ensemble with Signal Strength Clustering for Indoor Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks

The paper introduces a method which improves localization accuracy of the signal strength fingerprinting approach. According to the proposed method, entire localization area is divided into regions by clustering the fingerprint database. For each region a prototype of the received signal strength is determined and a dedicated artificial neural network (ANN) is trained by using only those fingerprints that belong to this region (cluster). Final estimation of the location is obtained by fusion of the coordinates delivered by selected ANNs. Sensor nodes have to store only the signal strength prototypes and synaptic weights of the ANNs in order to estimate their locations. This approach significantly reduces the amount of memory required to store a received signal strength map. Various ANN topologies were considered in this study. Improvement of the localization accuracy as well as speed-up of learning process was achieved by employing fully connected neural networks. The proposed method was verified and compared against state-of-the-art localization approaches in realworld indoor environment by using both stationary andmobile sensor nodes

Classifier-Based Data Transmission Reduction in Wearable Sensor Network for Human Activity Monitoring

The recent development of wireless wearable sensor networks offers a spectrum of new applications in fields of healthcare, medicine, activity monitoring, sport, safety, human-machine interfacing, and beyond. Successful use of this technology depends on lifetime of the battery-powered sensor nodes. This paper presents a new method for extending the lifetime of the wearable sensor networks by avoiding unnecessary data transmissions. The introduced method is based on embedded classifiers that allow sensor nodes to decide if current sensor readings have to be transmitted to cluster head or not. In order to train the classifiers, a procedure was elaborated, which takes into account the impact of data selection on accuracy of a recognition system. This approach was implemented in a prototype of wearable sensor network for human activity monitoring. Real-world experiments were conducted to evaluate the new method in terms of network lifetime, energy consumption, and accuracy of human activity recognition. Results of the experimental evaluation have confirmed that, the proposed method enables significant prolongation of the network lifetime, while preserving high accuracy of the activity recognition. The experiments have also revealed advantages of the method in comparison with state-of-the-art algorithms for data transmission reduction

Enhancing the efficiency of electricity utilization through home energy management systems within the smart grid framework

The concept behind smart grids is the aggregation of “intelligence” into the grid, whether through communication systems technologies that allow broadcast/data reception in real-time, or through monitoring and systems control in an autonomous way. With respect to the technological advancements, in recent years there has been a significant increment in devices and new strategies for the implementation of smart buildings/homes, due to the growing awareness of society in relation to environmental concerns and higher energy costs, so that energy efficiency improvements can provide real gains within modern society. In this perspective, the end-users are seen as active players with the ability to manage their energy resources, for example, microproduction units, domestic loads, electric vehicles and their participation in demand response events. This thesis is focused on identifying application areas where such technologies could bring benefits for their applicability, such as the case of wireless networks, considering the positive and negative points of each protocol available in the market. Moreover, this thesis provides an evaluation of dynamic prices of electricity and peak power, using as an example a system with electric vehicles and energy storage, supported by mixed-integer linear programming, within residential energy management. This thesis will also develop a power measuring prototype designed to process and determine the main electrical measurements and quantify the electrical load connected to a low voltage alternating current system. Finally, two cases studies are proposed regarding the application of model predictive control and thermal regulation for domestic applications with cooling requirements, allowing to minimize energy consumption, considering the restrictions of demand, load and acclimatization in the system