Hyperglycemia identification using ECG in deep learning era

A growing number of smart wearable biosensors are operating in the medical IoT environment and those that capture physiological signals have received special attention. Electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the physiological signals used in the cardiovascular and medical fields that has encouraged researchers to discover new non-invasive methods to diagnose hyperglycemia as a personal variable. Over the years, researchers have proposed different techniques to detect hyperglycemia using ECG. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning architecture that can identify hyperglycemia using heartbeats from ECG signals. In addition, we introduce a new fiducial feature extraction technique that improves the performance of the deep learning classifier. We evaluate the proposed method with ECG data from 1119 different subjects to assess the efficiency of hyperglycemia detection of the proposed work. The result indicates that the proposed algorithm is effective in detecting hyperglycemia with a 94.53% area under the curve (AUC), 87.57% sensitivity, and 85.04% specificity. That performance represents an relative improvement of 53% versus the best model found in the literature. The high sensitivity and specificity achieved by the 10-layer deep neural network proposed in this work provide an excellent indication that ECG possesses intrinsic information that can indicate the level of blood glucose concentration

A Universal Anti-Spoofing Approach for Contactless Fingerprint Biometric Systems

With the increasing integration of smartphones into our daily lives, fingerphotos are becoming a potential contactless authentication method. While it offers convenience, it is also more vulnerable to spoofing using various presentation attack instruments (PAI). The contactless fingerprint is an emerging biometric authentication but has not yet been heavily investigated for anti-spoofing. While existing anti-spoofing approaches demonstrated fair results, they have encountered challenges in terms of universality and scalability to detect any unseen/unknown spoofed samples. To address this issue, we propose a universal presentation attack detection method for contactless fingerprints, despite having limited knowledge of presentation attack samples. We generated synthetic contactless fingerprints using StyleGAN from live finger photos and integrating them to train a semi-supervised ResNet-18 model. A novel joint loss function, combining the Arcface and Center loss, is introduced with a regularization to balance between the two loss functions and minimize the variations within the live samples while enhancing the inter-class variations between the deepfake and live samples. We also conducted a comprehensive comparison of different regularizations' impact on the joint loss function for presentation attack detection (PAD) and explored the performance of a modified ResNet-18 architecture with different activation functions (i.e., leaky ReLU and RelU) in conjunction with Arcface and center loss. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the model using unseen types of spoof attacks and live data. Our proposed method achieves a Bona Fide Classification Error Rate (BPCER) of 0.12\%, an Attack Presentation Classification Error Rate (APCER) of 0.63\%, and an Average Classification Error Rate (ACER) of 0.37\%

ECG Biometric Authentication: A Comparative Analysis

Robust authentication and identification methods become an indispensable urgent task to protect the integrity of the devices and the sensitive data. Passwords have provided access control and authentication, but have shown their inherent vulnerabilities. The speed and convenience factor are what makes biometrics the ideal authentication solution as they could have a low probability of circumvention. To overcome the limitations of the traditional biometric systems, electrocardiogram (ECG) has received the most attention from the biometrics community due to the highly individualized nature of the ECG signals and the fact that they are ubiquitous and difficult to counterfeit. However, one of the main challenges in ECG-based biometric development is the lack of large ECG databases. In this paper, we contribute to creating a new large gallery off-the-person ECG datasets that can provide new opportunities for the ECG biometric research community. We explore the impact of filtering type, segmentation, feature extraction, and health status on ECG biometric by using the evaluation metrics. Our results have shown that our ECG biometric authentication outperforms existing methods lacking the ability to efficiently extract features, filtering, segmentation, and matching. This is evident by obtaining 100% accuracy for PTB, MIT-BHI, CEBSDB, CYBHI, ECG-ID, and in-house ECG-BG database in spite of noisy, unhealthy ECG signals while performing five-fold cross-validation. In addition, an average of 2.11% EER among 1,694 subjects is obtained

Flash-based security primitives: Evolution, challenges and future directions

Over the last two decades, hardware security has gained increasing attention in academia and industry. Flash memory has been given a spotlight in recent years, with the question of whether or not it can prove useful in a security role. Because of inherent process variation in the characteristics of flash memory modules, they can provide a unique fingerprint for a device and have thus been proposed as locations for hardware security primitives. These primitives include physical unclonable functions (PUFs), true random number generators (TRNGs), and integrated circuit (IC) counterfeit detection. In this paper, we evaluate the efficacy of flash memory-based security primitives and categorize them based on the process variations they exploit, as well as other features. We also compare and evaluate flash-based security primitives in order to identify drawbacks and essential design considerations. Finally, we describe new directions, challenges of research, and possible security vulnerabilities for flash-based security primitives that we believe would benefit from further exploration

Influence of planting designs on winter thermal comfort in an urban park

Various planting designs behave in different ways on microclimate and thermal comfort due to mainly distinct features of vegetation type and ratio. The papers simulated the microclimate behavior and thermal comfort of different planting design scenarios of an urban park using ENVI-met model. We measured temperature, relative humidity and wind velocity during the coldest period of 2016. Seven scenarios of planting design with different types and ratios of vegetation were simulated. In scenario of evergreen trees, humidity was relatively high while temperature and wind velocity were decreased. Simulated grass covered park and deciduous trees showed higher temperature and wind velocity. Scenario of grasses and the scenarios with high ratio of deciduous trees in comparison with other scenarios indicated lower wind speeds. The findings can be seen as a possibility of improvement of winter thermal comfort, considering a proper planting design as an important step in order to achieve Citizen Satisfaction

Global, regional, and national cancer incidence, mortality, years of life lost, years lived with disability, and disability-Adjusted life-years for 29 cancer groups, 1990 to 2017 : A systematic analysis for the global burden of disease study

Importance: Cancer and other noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) are now widely recognized as a threat to global development. The latest United Nations high-level meeting on NCDs reaffirmed this observation and also highlighted the slow progress in meeting the 2011 Political Declaration on the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases and the third Sustainable Development Goal. Lack of situational analyses, priority setting, and budgeting have been identified as major obstacles in achieving these goals. All of these have in common that they require information on the local cancer epidemiology. The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study is uniquely poised to provide these crucial data. Objective: To describe cancer burden for 29 cancer groups in 195 countries from 1990 through 2017 to provide data needed for cancer control planning. Evidence Review: We used the GBD study estimation methods to describe cancer incidence, mortality, years lived with disability, years of life lost, and disability-Adjusted life-years (DALYs). Results are presented at the national level as well as by Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a composite indicator of income, educational attainment, and total fertility rate. We also analyzed the influence of the epidemiological vs the demographic transition on cancer incidence. Findings: In 2017, there were 24.5 million incident cancer cases worldwide (16.8 million without nonmelanoma skin cancer [NMSC]) and 9.6 million cancer deaths. The majority of cancer DALYs came from years of life lost (97%), and only 3% came from years lived with disability. The odds of developing cancer were the lowest in the low SDI quintile (1 in 7) and the highest in the high SDI quintile (1 in 2) for both sexes. In 2017, the most common incident cancers in men were NMSC (4.3 million incident cases); tracheal, bronchus, and lung (TBL) cancer (1.5 million incident cases); and prostate cancer (1.3 million incident cases). The most common causes of cancer deaths and DALYs for men were TBL cancer (1.3 million deaths and 28.4 million DALYs), liver cancer (572000 deaths and 15.2 million DALYs), and stomach cancer (542000 deaths and 12.2 million DALYs). For women in 2017, the most common incident cancers were NMSC (3.3 million incident cases), breast cancer (1.9 million incident cases), and colorectal cancer (819000 incident cases). The leading causes of cancer deaths and DALYs for women were breast cancer (601000 deaths and 17.4 million DALYs), TBL cancer (596000 deaths and 12.6 million DALYs), and colorectal cancer (414000 deaths and 8.3 million DALYs). Conclusions and Relevance: The national epidemiological profiles of cancer burden in the GBD study show large heterogeneities, which are a reflection of different exposures to risk factors, economic settings, lifestyles, and access to care and screening. The GBD study can be used by policy makers and other stakeholders to develop and improve national and local cancer control in order to achieve the global targets and improve equity in cancer care. © 2019 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.Peer reviewe

Bone temperature reduction during drilling via alcohol: brief report

Background: Cooling is one of the main processes in bone temperature decrement, while drilling. this experiment was conducted for examination of alcohol effect as cooler in prevention of thermal necrosis. Methods: Bovine femur bone was considered as specimen and inclusions criteria for this study were: femur bone, cortical area and without bone periosteum. Drilling process was conducted by two types of k-wire- Trocar and Diamond, three speeds and three feed rates and in the time of march, 2016 in the place of university of Isfahan, Iran. Two type of thermometer- K-thermocouple and infrared thermometer- were used for temperature measurement, and all data were logged by data logger. Drilling processes were conducted by milling machine with ability of table movement for feed rate parameter. Method of alcohol usage in cooling was in form of conducting alcoholic gauze with k-wire while rotating. Results: Totally in the cases of trocar and diamond wires, while were cooled by alcohol, the risk of bone necrosis decreased about 44.44% and 66.66%. All temperature data were logged by changing parameters. maximum temperature, 94.5 °C, belonged to trocar wire in a non-cooling condition and after usage of cooler it decreased to 75 °C.  In the usage of diamond wires, the maximum temperature was recorded 71 °C and the temperature while using alcohol was 51 °C. Diamond wire had better result in both conditions of cooling and no cooling, and this is related to geometric differences between two types of wires. Conclusion: Due to obtained data from examination, utilization alcohol can have an important influence on final bone temperature decreasing. The way of using alcohol was in the style of attrition soaked gauze onto wire while insertion