Revealing New Technologies in Ocean Engineering Research using Machine Learning

On par with aerospace engineering, ocean engineering has caught a lot of attention re-cently. In this paper we employ machine learning and natural language processing methods to reveal new technologies and research hotspots in the ocean engineering field. Our data collection includes 14 high-impact journals, and the abstracts of almost 30,000 papers pub- lished from 2010 to 2019. We employed two topic models, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and PhraseLDA. Used independently, the LDA model may lack interpretability and the PhraseLDA result may lose information in the final topics. We hence combined these two models and discovered the research hotspots for each year using affinity propagation cluster- ing and word-cloud-based visualization. The results reveal that several topics such as "wind power" and "ship structure", areas such as the European and Arctic seas, and some common research methods are increasing in popularity. This work consists of data collection, topic modelling, clustering, and visualization, which can help researchers understand the trends and important topics in ocean engineering as well as other fields

Accurate Image Analysis of the Retina Using Hessian Matrix and Binarisation of Thresholded Entropy with Application of Texture Mapping

In this paper, we demonstrate a comprehensive method for segmenting the retinal vasculature in camera images of the fundus. This is of interest in the area of diagnostics for eye diseases that affect the blood vessels in the eye. In a departure from other state-of-the-art methods, vessels are first pre-grouped together with graph partitioning, using a spectral clustering technique based on morphological features. Local curvature is estimated over the whole image using eigenvalues of Hessian matrix in order to enhance the vessels, which appear as ridges in images of the retina. The result is combined with a binarized image, obtained using a threshold that maximizes entropy, to extract the retinal vessels from the background. Speckle type noise is reduced by applying a connectivity constraint on the extracted curvature based enhanced image. This constraint is varied over the image according to each region's predominant blood vessel size. The resultant image exhibits the central light reflex of retinal arteries and veins, which prevents the segmentation of whole vessels. To address this, the earlier entropy-based binarization technique is repeated on the original image, but crucially, with a different threshold to incorporate the central reflex vessels. The final segmentation is achieved by combining the segmented vessels with and without central light reflex. We carry out our approach on DRIVE and REVIEW, two publicly available collections of retinal images for research purposes. The obtained results are compared with state-of-the-art methods in the literature using metrics such as sensitivity (true positive rate), selectivity (false positive rate) and accuracy rates for the DRIVE images and measured vessel widths for the REVIEW images. Our approach out-performs the methods in the literature.Xiaoxia Yin, Brian W-H Ng, Jing He, Yanchun Zhang, Derek Abbot

Wireless sensor networks for heritage object deformation detection and tracking algorithm

Deformation is the direct cause of heritage object collapse. It is significant to monitor and signal the early warnings of the deformation of heritage objects. However, traditional heritage object monitoring methods only roughly monitor a simple-shaped heritage object as a whole, but cannot monitor complicated heritage objects, which may have a large number of surfaces inside and outside. Wireless sensor networks, comprising many small-sized, low-cost, low-power intelligent sensor nodes, are more useful to detect the deformation of every small part of the heritage objects. Wireless sensor networks need an effective mechanism to reduce both the communication costs and energy consumption in order to monitor the heritage objects in real time. In this paper, we provide an effective heritage object deformation detection and tracking method using wireless sensor networks (EffeHDDT). In EffeHDDT, we discover a connected core set of sensor nodes to reduce the communication cost for transmitting and collecting the data of the sensor networks. Particularly, we propose a heritage object boundary detecting and tracking mechanism. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that our EffeHDDT method outperforms the existing methods in terms of network traffic and the precision of the deformation detection

Building cloud-based healthcare data mining services

The linkage between healthcare service and cloud computing techniques has drawn much attention lately. Up to the present, most works focus on IT system migration and the management of distributed healthcare data rather than taking advantage of information hidden in the data. In this paper, we propose to explore healthcare data via cloud-based healthcare data mining services. Specifically, we propose a cloud-based healthcare data mining framework for healthcare data mining service development. Under such framework, we further develop a cloud-based healthcare data mining service to predict patients future length of stay in hospital

Normal Red Blood Cell Count Reference Values in Chinese Presenile Women Given by Geographical Area

Background/PurposeWe aimed to standardize the normal reference value of red blood cell (RBC) counts in Chinese presenile women using an underlying scientific basis.MethodsThis research was conducted to study the relationship between the normal reference value of 31,405 RBC samples from presenile women in eight different geographical areas in China. RBC counts were determined using a microscopic counting method.ResultsThere was a significant correlation between geographical factors and the normal reference RBC value in presenile women (F = 187.82, p = 0.000). Using stepwise regression analysis, one regression equation was obtained.ConclusionIf geographical values are obtained in a certain area, the normal RBC reference value in presenile women in this area can be obtained using the regression equation

A clique-based WBAN scheduling for mobile wireless body area networks

Wireless-body-area-networks (WBAN) that generally comprises different types of sensors are useful to gather multiple parameters together, such as body temperature, blood pressure, pulse, heartbeat and blood sugar. However, a dense and mobile WBAN often suffers from interference, which causes serious problems, such as degrading throughput and wasting energy. So, the sensors in WBAN are not active together at the same time and they can be partitioned to different groups and each group works in turn to avoid interference. In this paper, we provide a Clique-Based WBAN Scheduling (CBWS) algorithm to cluster sensors of a single or multiple WBAN into different groups to avoid interference. Particularly, we propose a coloring based scheduling method to schedule all groups to work in a sequence of time slots. The experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed CBWS algorithm in terms of system throughput. © 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V

A pyramid-like model for heartbeat classification from ECG recordings

<div><p>Heartbeat classification is an important step in the early-stage detection of cardiac arrhythmia, which has been identified as a type of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) affecting millions of people around the world. The current progress on heartbeat classification from ECG recordings is facing a challenge to achieve high classification sensitivity on disease heartbeats with a satisfied overall accuracy. Most of the work take individual heartbeats as independent data samples in processing. Furthermore, the use of a static feature set for classification of all types of heartbeats often causes distractions when identifying supraventricular (S) ectopic beats. In this work, a pyramid-like model is proposed to improve the performance of heartbeat classification. The model distinguishes the classification of <i>normal</i> and <i>S</i> beats and takes advantage of the neighbor-related information to assist identification of <i>S</i> bests. The proposed model was evaluated on the benchmark <i>MIT-BIH-AR</i> database and the <i>St. Petersburg Institute of Cardiological Technics</i>(INCART) database for generalization performance measurement. The results reported prove that the proposed pyramid-like model exhibits higher performance than the state-of-the-art rivals in the identification of disease heartbeats as well as maintains a reasonable overall classification accuracy.</p></div