Deep Neural Networks for the Recognition and Classification of Heart Murmurs Using Neuromorphic Auditory Sensors

Auscultation is one of the most used techniques for detecting cardiovascular diseases, which is one of the main causes of death in the world. Heart murmurs are the most common abnormal finding when a patient visits the physician for auscultation. These heart sounds can either be innocent, which are harmless, or abnormal, which may be a sign of a more serious heart condition. However, the accuracy rate of primary care physicians and expert cardiologists when auscultating is not good enough to avoid most of both type-I (healthy patients are sent for echocardiogram) and type-II (pathological patients are sent home without medication or treatment) errors made. In this paper, the authors present a novel convolutional neural network based tool for classifying between healthy people and pathological patients using a neuromorphic auditory sensor for FPGA that is able to decompose the audio into frequency bands in real time. For this purpose, different networks have been trained with the heart murmur information contained in heart sound recordings obtained from nine different heart sound databases sourced from multiple research groups. These samples are segmented and preprocessed using the neuromorphic auditory sensor to decompose their audio information into frequency bands and, after that, sonogram images with the same size are generated. These images have been used to train and test different convolutional neural network architectures. The best results have been obtained with a modified version of the AlexNet model, achieving 97% accuracy (specificity: 95.12%, sensitivity: 93.20%, PhysioNet/CinC Challenge 2016 score: 0.9416). This tool could aid cardiologists and primary care physicians in the auscultation process, improving the decision making task and reducing type-I and type-II errors.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2016-77785-

NAVIS: Neuromorphic Auditory VISualizer Tool

This software presents diverse utilities to perform the first post-processing layer taking the neuromorphic auditory sensors (NAS) information. The used NAS implements in FPGA a cascade filters architecture, imitating the behavior of the basilar membrane and inner hair cells and working with the sound information decomposed into its frequency components as spike streams. The well-known neuromorphic hardware interface Address-Event-Representation (AER) is used to propagate auditory information out of the NAS, emulating the auditory vestibular nerve. Using the information packetized into aedat files, which are generated through the jAER software plus an AER to USB computer interface, NAVIS implements a set of graphs that allows to represent the auditory information as cochleograms, histograms, sonograms, etc. It can also split the auditory information into different sets depending on the activity level of the spike streams. The main contribution of this software tool is that it allows complex audio post-processing treatments and representations, which is a novelty for spike-based systems in the neuromorphic community and it will help neuromorphic engineers to build sets for training spiking neural networks (SNN).Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2012-37868-C04-0

Plataformas digitales y sus fracturas pedagógicas

El documento se genera ante la falta de un serio debate sobre el uso reflexivo de las TIC dentro de la educación, pues con su llegada, se ha generado una explosiva sobre valoración del elemento tecnológico en su posible intervención resolutiva para las distintas problemáticas educativas. Además, con la actual forma de uso de las TIC, se están imponiendo una serie de estrategias que relegan lo pedagógico a planos secundarios, y meramente técnicos. Didácticamente es cuestionable que con el uso de estos recursos tecnológicos no exista una integración orientada a resolver necesidades educativas. Es momento de ubicar el centro de la actividad educativa, no por apego a convencionalismos, sino por una necesidad de salvar las fracturas, dislocaciones que están acometiendo al proceso educativo. Es necesario un mayor rigor metodológico en su aplicación y desarrollo para así producir recursos fecundos. No propongo el destierro de las TIC en la educación, por el contrario, hago el reconocimiento de una relación histórica condicionada, pero que requiere una serie de transformaciones en distintos momentos del proceso formativo. Finalmente, en este artículo, después de observar 105 cursos virtuales, analizo descriptivamente la necesidad de una metodología de elaboración y evaluación pedagógica para esta modalidad de trabajo formativo, esperando que el conjunto de los elementos expuestos, sirva a los entornos de competencia de transformación del profesorado

Análisis del flujo de valor en una empresa de productos alimenticios con propósitos médicos especializados

54 páginasla empresa objeto de estudio en este proyecto se fundó en el año 2015. Esta se dedica a la elaboración de alimentos con propósito médico especializado, que ayudan a tener un sano balance nutricional en los pacientes que por su condición médica no pueden consumir productos comunes. Inicialmente, la empresa se dedicaba exclusivamente a la comercialización de su portafolio, y sus productos eran fabricados por un tercerizado. En el año 2019, ante la necesidad de conservar la confidencialidad de sus fórmulas, y de garantizar el control del proceso y la calidad de sus productos, ésta decidió construir una planta de producción propia bajo los estándares de inocuidad requeridos y con las certificaciones necesarias para su funcionamiento. El proceso productivo de la planta está diseñado de acuerdo con células de manufactura (alistamiento, pesaje, llenado, cerrado y etiquetado). En estas áreas se realizan sus operaciones de forma manual utilizando un número considerable de colaboradores.the company under study in this project was founded in 2015. It is dedicated to the production of foods for specialized medical purposes, which help to achieve a healthy nutritional balance in patients who, due to their medical condition, are unable to consume a normal diet. Initially, the company was dedicated exclusively to the marketing and sale of its portfolio; and its products were manufactured by an outsourced. In 2019, given the need to preserve the confidentiality of its formulas, guarantee the control of the process and the quality of its products, it was decided to build its own production plant under the required safety standards and with the necessary certifications for its operation. The production process of the plant is designed in manufacturing cells (preparation, weighing, filling, closing and labelling). These are areas that carry out their operations manually using a considerable number of collaborators.Maestría en Gerencia de OperacionesMagíster en Gerencia de Operacione

Heteroglosia en Los viajes de Gulliver de Jonathan Swift

Los viajes de Gulliver (1726) de Jonathan Swift es considerada una de las grandes obras de la literatura inglesa del siglo XVIII; en buena medida, su encanto radica en la sátira mordaz de la humanidad al relativizar la superioridad del ser humano y de sus instituciones. Swift destaca cómo la soberbia y la avaricia pueden conducir a la humanidad a su degradación y pone en duda su innata racionalidad. En la obra se ridiculiza a importantes figuras públicas y se hace mofa de la ciencia y la filosofía del temprano siglo dieciocho; de ahí su carácter claramente controversial. En esta obra es notorio el remedo de una gran diversidad de lenguajes sociales, en los cuales se expresan muchas de las preocupaciones filosóficas, políticas y científicas de su tiempo, tales como la posición de Inglaterra en la guerra contra Francia o el destino del país en el terreno religioso. Sobre todo, no obstante, la obra se presenta como una parodia de los libros de viaje, género que gozaba de una gran popularidad en ese tiempo. Este artículo destaca el papel desempeñado por la parodia en la construcción de esta obra y muestra un ejemplo de lo que Bajtín entiende como heteroglosia, recurso que contribuyó ostensiblemente en el posterior desarrollo de la narrativa moderna

AER Neuro-Inspired interface to Anthropomorphic Robotic Hand

Address-Event-Representation (AER) is a communication protocol for transferring asynchronous events between VLSI chips, originally developed for neuro-inspired processing systems (for example, image processing). Such systems may consist of a complicated hierarchical structure with many chips that transmit data among them in real time, while performing some processing (for example, convolutions). The information transmitted is a sequence of spikes coded using high speed digital buses. These multi-layer and multi-chip AER systems perform actually not only image processing, but also audio processing, filtering, learning, locomotion, etc. This paper present an AER interface for controlling an anthropomorphic robotic hand with a neuro-inspired system.Unión Europea IST-2001-34124 (CAVIAR)Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC-2003-08164-C03-02Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC2000-0406-P4- 0

Stereo Matching in Address-Event-Representation (AER) Bio-Inspired Binocular Systems in a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)

In stereo-vision processing, the image-matching step is essential for results, although it involves a very high computational cost. Moreover, the more information is processed, the more time is spent by the matching algorithm, and the more ine cient it is. Spike-based processing is a relatively new approach that implements processing methods by manipulating spikes one by one at the time they are transmitted, like a human brain. The mammal nervous system can solve much more complex problems, such as visual recognition by manipulating neuron spikes. The spike-based philosophy for visual information processing based on the neuro-inspired address-event-representation (AER) is currently achieving very high performance. The aim of this work was to study the viability of a matching mechanism in stereo-vision systems, using AER codification and its implementation in a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Some studies have been done before in an AER system with monitored data using a computer; however, this kind of mechanism has not been implemented directly on hardware. To this end, an epipolar geometry basis applied to AER systems was studied and implemented, with other restrictions, in order to achieve good results in a real-time scenario. The results and conclusions are shown, and the viability of its implementation is proven.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2016-77785-

Unraveling the COVID-19 hospitalization dynamics in Spain using Bayesian inference

Background: One of the main challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic is to make sense of available, but often heterogeneous and noisy data. This contribution presents a data-driven methodology that allows exploring the hospitalization dynamics of COVID-19, exemplified with a study of 17 autonomous regions in Spain from summer 2020 to summer 2021. Methods: We use data on new daily cases and hospitalizations reported by the Spanish Ministry of Health to implement a Bayesian inference method that allows making short-term predictions of bed occupancy of COVID-19 patients in each of the autonomous regions of the country. Results: We show how to use the temporal series for the number of daily admissions and discharges from hospital to reproduce the hospitalization dynamics of COVID-19 patients. For the case-study of the region of Aragon, we estimate that the probability of being admitted to hospital care upon infection is 0.090 [0.086-0.094], (95% C.I.), with the distribution governing hospital admission yielding a median interval of 3.5 days and an IQR of 7 days. Likewise, the distribution on the length of stay produces estimates of 12 days for the median and 10 days for the IQR. A comparison between model parameters for the regions analyzed allows to detect differences and changes in policies of the health authorities. Conclusions: We observe important regional differences, signaling that to properly compare very different populations, it is paramount to acknowledge all the diversity in terms of culture, socio-economic status, and resource availability. To better understand the impact of this pandemic, much more data, disaggregated and properly annotated, should be made available

CNN-LSTM-based prognostics of bidirectional converters for electric vehicles’ machine

This paper proposes an approach to estimate the state of health of DC-DC converters that feed the electrical system of an electric vehicle. They have an important role in providing a smooth and rectified DC voltage to the electric machine. Thus, it is important to diagnose the actual status and predict the future performance of the converter and specifically of the electrolytic capacitors, in order to avoid malfunctioning and failures, since it is known they have the highest failure rates among power converter components. To this end, accelerated aging tests of the electrolytic capacitors are performed by applying an electrical overstress. The gathered data are used to train a CNN-LSTM model that is capable of predicting the future values of the capacitance and the equivalent series resistance (ESR) of the electrolytic capacitor. This model can be used to estimate the remaining useful life of the device, thus, increasing the reliability of the system and ensuring an adequate operating condition of the electric motor.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version