Detection of early morning daily activities with static home and wearable wireless sensors

This paper describes the infrastructure of a flexible, cost-effective, wireless in-home activity monitoring system for assisting patients with cognitive impairments due to traumatic brain injury (TBI) and presents initial applications in detecting functional activities executed in the early morning. The system issues automatic reminders or guidance only when needed and as non-intrusive as possible by continuously monitoring of the activities of the TBI patient. The system integrates static home and wearable wireless sensors to detect the functional activity of the patient. It locates the subject with fixed home sensors, and captures the details of the executed activity with a wearable wireless accelerometer. We show promising experimental results from 7 subjects while completing washing face, shaving and brushing activities. The proposed system achieved 93.5%, 92.5 % and 95.6 % classification accuracy in the recognition of these three tasks respectively

Classification of Hazelnut Kernels by Using Impact Acoustic Time-Frequency Patterns

Hazelnuts with damaged or cracked shells are more prone to infection with aflatoxin producing molds (Aspergillus flavus). These molds can cause cancer. In this study, we introduce a new approach that separates damaged/cracked hazelnut kernels from good ones by using time-frequency features obtained from impact acoustic signals. The proposed technique requires no prior knowledge of the relevant time and frequency locations. In an offline step, the algorithm adaptively segments impact signals from a training data set in time using local cosine packet analysis and a Kullback-Leibler criterion to assess the discrimination power of different segmentations. In each resulting time segment, the signal is further decomposed into subbands using an undecimated wavelet transform. The most discriminative subbands are selected according to the Euclidean distance between the cumulative probability distributions of the corresponding subband coefficients. The most discriminative subbands are fed into a linear discriminant analysis classifier. In the online classification step, the algorithm simply computes the learned features from the observed signal and feeds them to the linear discriminant analysis (LDA) classifier. The algorithm achieved a throughput rate of 45 nuts/s and a classification accuracy of 96% with the 30 most discriminative features, a higher rate than those provided with prior methods

Prediction of STN-DBS Electrode Implantation Track in Parkinson’s Disease by Using Local Field Potentials

Optimal electrophysiological placement of the DBS electrode may lead to better long term clinical outcomes. Inter-subject anatomical variability and limitations in stereotaxic neuroimaging increase the complexity of physiological mapping performed in the operating room. Microelectrode single unit neuronal recording remains the most common intraoperative mapping technique, but requires significant expertise and is fraught by potential technical difficulties including robust measurement of the signal. In contrast, local field potentials (LFPs), owing to their oscillatory and robust nature and being more correlated with the disease symptoms, can overcome these technical issues. Therefore, we hypothesized that multiple spectral features extracted from microelectrode-recorded LFPs could be used to automate the identification of the optimal track and the STN localization. In this regard, we recorded LFPs from microelectrodes in three tracks from 22 patients during DBS electrode implantation surgery at different depths and aimed to predict the track selected by the neurosurgeon based on the interpretation of single unit recordings. A least mean square (LMS) algorithm was used to de-correlate LFPs in each track, in order to remove common activity between channels and increase their spatial specificity. Subband power in the beta band (11-32Hz) and high frequency range (200-450Hz) were extracted from the de-correlated LFP data and used as features. A linear discriminant analysis (LDA) method was applied both for the localization of the dorsal border of STN and the prediction of the optimal track. By fusing the information from these low and high frequency bands, the dorsal border of STN was localized with a root mean square error of 1.22 mm. The prediction accuracy for the optimal track was 80%. Individual beta band (11-32Hz) and the range of high frequency oscillations (200-450Hz) provided prediction accuracies of 72% and 68% respectively. The best prediction result obtained with monopolar LFP data was 68%. These results establish the initial evidence that LFPs can be strategically fused with computational intelligence in the operating room for STN localization and the selection of the track for chronic DBS electrode implantation

Unsupervised machine learning can delineate central sulcus by using the spatiotemporal characteristic of somatosensory evoked potentials

Somatosensory evoked potentials (SSEPs) recorded with electrocorticography (ECoG) for central sulcus (CS) identification is a widely accepted procedure in routine intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring. Clinical practices test the short-latency SSEPs for the phase reversal over strip electrodes. However, assessments based on waveform morphology are susceptible to variations in interpretations due to the hand area's localized nature and usually require multiple electrode placements or electrode relocation. We investigated the feasibility of unsupervised delineation of the CS by using the spatiotemporal patterns of the SSEP captured with the ECoG grid. . Intraoperatively, SSEPs were recorded from eight patients using ECoG grids placed over the sensorimotor cortex. Neurosurgeons blinded to the electrophysiology identified the sensory and motor gyri using neuronavigation based on sulcal anatomy. We quantified the most discriminatory time points in SSEPs temporal profile between the primary motor (M1) and somatosensory (S1) cortex using the Fisher discrimination criterion. We visualized the amplitude gradient of the SSEP over a 2D heat map to provide visual feedback for the delineation of the CS based on electrophysiology. Subsequently, we employed spectral clustering using the entire the SSEP waveform without selecting any time points and grouped ECoG channels in an unsupervised fashion. Consistently in all patients, two different time points provided almost equal discrimination between anterior and posterior channels, which vividly outlined the CS when we viewed the SSEP amplitude distribution as a spatial 2D heat map. The first discriminative time point was in proximity to the conventionally favored ∼20 ms peak (N20), and the second time point was slightly later than the markedly high ∼30 ms peak (P30). Still, the location of these time points varied noticeably across subjects. Unsupervised clustering approach separated the anterior and posterior channels with an accuracy of 96.3% based on the time derivative of the SSEP trace without the need for a subject-specific time point selection. In contrast, the raw trace resulted in an accuracy of 88.0%. . We show that the unsupervised clustering of the SSEP trace assessed with subdural electrode grids can delineate the CS automatically with high precision, and the constructed heat maps can localize the motor cortex. We anticipate that the spatiotemporal patterns of SSEP fused with machine learning can serve as a useful tool to assist in surgical planning

Exploring the time-frequency content of high frequency oscillations for automated identification of seizure onset zone in epilepsy

Objective. High frequency oscillations (HFOs) in intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) recordings are considered as promising clinical biomarkers of epileptogenic regions in the brain. The aim of this study is to improve and automatize the detection of HFOs by exploring the time frequency content of iEEG and to investigate the seizure onset zone (SOZ) detection accuracy during the sleep, awake and pre-ictal states in patients with epilepsy, for the purpose of assisting the localization of SOZ in clinical practice. Approach. Ten-minute iEEG segments were defined during different states in eight patients with refractory epilepsy. A three-stage algorithm was implemented to detect HFOs in these segments. First, an amplitude based initial detection threshold was used to generate a large pool of HFO candidates. Then distinguishing features were extracted from the time and time frequency domain of the raw iEEG and used with a Gaussian mixture model clustering to isolate HFO events from other activities. The spatial distribution of HFO clusters was correlated with the seizure onset channels identified by neurologists in seven patient with good surgical outcome. Main results. The overlapping rates of localized channels and seizure onset locations were high in all states. The best result was obtained using the iEEG data during sleep, achieving a sensitivity of 81%, and a specificity of 96%. The channels with maximum number of HFOs identified epileptogenic areas where the seizures occurred more frequently. Significance. The current study was conducted using iEEG data collected in realistic clinical conditions without channel pre-exclusion. HFOs were investigated with novel features extracted from the entire frequency band, and were correlated with SOZ in different states. The results indicate that automatic HFO detection with unsupervised clustering methods exploring the time frequency content of raw iEEG can be efficiently used to identify the epileptogenic zone with an accurate and efficient manner