Gray-level co-occurrence matrix bone fracture detection

Problem statement: Currently doctors in orthopedic wards inspect the bone x-ray images according to their experience and knowledge in bone fracture analysis. Manual examination of x-rays has multitude drawbacks. The process is time-consuming and subjective. Approach: Since detection of fractures is an important orthopedics and radiologic problem and therefore a Computer Aided Detection(CAD) system should be developed to improve the scenario. In this study, a fracture detection CAD based on GLCM recognition could improve the current manual inspection of x-ray images system. The GLCM for fracture and non-fracture bone is computed and analysis is made. Features of Homogeneity, contrast, energy, correlation are calculated to classify the fractured bone. Results: 30 images of femur fractures have been tested, the result shows that the CAD system can differentiate the x-ray bone into fractured and nonfractured femur. The accuracy obtained from the system is 86.67. Conclusion: The CAD system is proved to be effective in classifying the digital radiograph of bone fracture. However the accuracy rate is not perfect, the performance of this system can be further improved using multiple features of GLCM and future works can be done on classifying the bone into different degree of fracture specifically

Multipurpose contrast enhancement on epiphyseal plates and ossification centers for bone age assessment

BACKGROUND: The high variations of background luminance, low contrast and excessively enhanced contrast of hand bone radiograph often impede the bone age assessment rating system in evaluating the degree of epiphyseal plates and ossification centers development. The Global Histogram equalization (GHE) has been the most frequently adopted image contrast enhancement technique but the performance is not satisfying. A brightness and detail preserving histogram equalization method with good contrast enhancement effect has been a goal of much recent research in histogram equalization. Nevertheless, producing a well-balanced histogram equalized radiograph in terms of its brightness preservation, detail preservation and contrast enhancement is deemed to be a daunting task. METHOD: In this paper, we propose a novel framework of histogram equalization with the aim of taking several desirable properties into account, namely the Multipurpose Beta Optimized Bi-Histogram Equalization (MBOBHE). This method performs the histogram optimization separately in both sub-histograms after the segmentation of histogram using an optimized separating point determined based on the regularization function constituted by three components. The result is then assessed by the qualitative and quantitative analysis to evaluate the essential aspects of histogram equalized image using a total of 160 hand radiographs that are implemented in testing and analyses which are acquired from hand bone online database. RESULT: From the qualitative analysis, we found that basic bi-histogram equalizations are not capable of displaying the small features in image due to incorrect selection of separating point by focusing on only certain metric without considering the contrast enhancement and detail preservation. From the quantitative analysis, we found that MBOBHE correlates well with human visual perception, and this improvement shortens the evaluation time taken by inspector in assessing the bone age. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed MBOBHE outperforms other existing methods regarding comprehensive performance of histogram equalization. All the features which are pertinent to bone age assessment are more protruding relative to other methods; this has shorten the required evaluation time in manual bone age assessment using TW method. While the accuracy remains unaffected or slightly better than using unprocessed original image. The holistic properties in terms of brightness preservation, detail preservation and contrast enhancement are simultaneous taken into consideration and thus the visual effect is contributive to manual inspection

Statistical parametric evaluation on new corpus design for Malay speech articulation disorder early diagnosis

Speech-to-Text or always been known as speech recognition plays an important role nowadays especially in medical area specifically in speech impairment. In this study, a Malay language speech-to-Text system was been designed by using Hidden Markov Model (HMM) as a statistical engine with emphasizing the way of Malay speech corpus design specifically for Malay articulation speech disorder. This study also describes and tests the correct number of state to analyze the changes in the performance of current Malay speech recognition in term of recognition accuracy. Statistical parametric representation method was utilized in this study and the Malay corpus database was constructed to be balanced with all the phonetic placed and manner of articulation sample appeared in Malay speech articulation therapy. The results were achieved by conducting few experiments by collecting sample from 80 patient speakers (child and adult) and contain for almost 30,720 sample training data

An artifacts removal post-processing for epiphyseal region-of-interest (EROI) localization in automated bone age assessment (BAA)

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Segmentation is the most crucial part in the computer-aided bone age assessment. A well-known type of segmentation performed in the system is adaptive segmentation. While providing better result than global thresholding method, the adaptive segmentation produces a lot of unwanted noise that could affect the latter process of epiphysis extraction.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A proposed method with anisotropic diffusion as pre-processing and a novel Bounded Area Elimination (BAE) post-processing algorithm to improve the algorithm of ossification site localization technique are designed with the intent of improving the adaptive segmentation result and the region-of interest (ROI) localization accuracy.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The results are then evaluated by quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis using texture feature evaluation. The result indicates that the image homogeneity after anisotropic diffusion has improved averagely on each age group for 17.59%. Results of experiments showed that the smoothness has been improved averagely 35% after BAE algorithm and the improvement of ROI localization has improved for averagely 8.19%. The MSSIM has improved averagely 10.49% after performing the BAE algorithm on the adaptive segmented hand radiograph.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The result indicated that hand radiographs which have undergone anisotropic diffusion have greatly reduced the noise in the segmented image and the result as well indicated that the BAE algorithm proposed is capable of removing the artifacts generated in adaptive segmentation.</p

Conceptual design of electromagnetic pulse for denied vehicular access application

Modern vehicle architectures are complemented by the use of advanced technologies, primarily in the Engine Control Unit (ECU). This article describes the proposed conceptual design of Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) for denied vehicular access applications, especially to vehicle (cars) engine ECU. The system mainly consists of five parts, namely power supply, magnetron, isolator, tuner, and pyramidal horn radiator. The magnetron is selected as the means for driving the pulse power generator at an operating frequency of 2.4 GHz. The pyramidal horn radiator with a gain of 15 dB is designed using CST Microwave software and fabricated as well as tested. The performance tests of the designed system are conducted in a laboratory environment and field trials, respectively. The effects of the EMP to the engine ECU are analyzed and discussed in terms of the radiated power, radiation gain, radiation pattern, and significant radiation distance. The expected target distance for stopping a vehicle is at least 3m to 5m

Wireless data gloves Malay sign language recognition system

This paper describes the structure and algorithm of the whole Wireless Bluetooth Data Gloves Sign Language Recognition System, which is defined as a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) system. This project is based on the need of developing an electronic device that can translate sign language into speech (sound) in order to make the communication take place between the mute & deaf community with the general public possible. Hence, the main objective of this project is to develop a system that can convert sign language into speech so that deaf people are able to communicate efficiently with normal people. This Human-Computer Interaction system is able to recognize 25 common words signing in Bahasa Isyarat Malaysia (BIM) by using Hidden Markov Models (HMM) methods. Both hands are involved in performing the BIM with all the sensor connecting wirelessly to PC with Bluetooth module. In the future, the system can be shrunk to become a stand alone system without any interaction with PC

Mini Kirsch Edge Detection and Its Sharpening Effect

In computer vision, edge detection is a crucial step in identifying the objects’ boundaries in an image. The existing edge detection methods function in either spatial domain or frequency domain, fail to outline the high continuity boundaries of the objects. In this work, we modified four-directional mini Kirsch edge detection kernels which enable full directional edge detection. We also introduced the novel involvement of the proposed method in image sharpening by adding the resulting edge map onto the original input image to enhance the edge details in the image. From the edge detection performance tests, our proposed method acquired the highest true edge pixels and true non-edge pixels detection, yielding the highest accuracy among all the comparing methods. Moreover, the sharpening effect offered by our proposed framework could achieve a more favorable visual appearance with a competitive score of peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity index value compared to the most widely used unsharp masking and Laplacian of Gaussian sharpening methods.  The edges of the sharpened image are further enhanced could potentially contribute to better boundary tracking and higher segmentation accuracy

Apoptotic mechanism of lantadene A from lantana camara leaves against prostatic cancer cells

Lantadene A (LA) which is one of the major pentacyclic triterpenoids in Lantana camara leaves was reported to exhibit anticancer property. However, the detail mechanism of LA inhibition against prostate cancer cells is still remained unknown. Hence, this study aimed to extract LA which was then used to treat LNCaP cells for the prediction of its apoptotic mechanism. A serial of separation techniques including maceration, solvent partition, crystallization and column chromatography was applied to recover LA. Approximately, 0.45%w/w LA was obtained from the plant leaves with 87.16% purity. The results found that the viability of LNCaP cells decreased with the increase of LA concentration with the IC50 of 208.4 μg/mL. High content screening showed the nucleuses of intact cells were started to collapse at the LA concentration more than 12.5 μg/mL, whereas the breakage of mitochondrial membrane was observed together with the release cytochrome C into cytosols. The activities of caspases -3/7 and -9 was found to increase in a dose dependent manner. Cell cycle arrest was happened during the (G0/G1) phase at the concentration of LA more than 50 μg/mL. As a conclusion, LA was effective to inhibit the growth of LNCaP cells without any cytotoxic effects to RWPE-1 cells. The inhibitory action of LA followed the intrinsic pathway of mitochondria dependent mechanism

Acoustic cardiac signals analysis: a Kalman filter–based approach

Auscultation of the heart is accompanied by both electrical activity and sound. Heart auscultation provides clues to diagnose many cardiac abnormalities. Unfortunately, detection of relevant symptoms and diagnosis based on heart sound through a stethoscope is difficult. The reason GPs find this difficult is that the heart sounds are of short duration and separated from one another by less than 30 ms. In addition, the cost of false positives constitutes wasted time and emotional anxiety for both patient and GP. Many heart diseases cause changes in heart sound, waveform, and additional murmurs before other signs and symptoms appear. Heart-sound auscultation is the primary test conducted by GPs. These sounds are generated primarily by turbulent flow of blood in the heart. Analysis of heart sounds requires a quiet environment with minimum ambient noise. In order to address such issues, the technique of denoising and estimating the biomedical heart signal is proposed in this investigation. Normally, the performance of the filter naturally depends on prior information related to the statistical properties of the signal and the background noise. This paper proposes Kalman filtering for denoising statistical heart sound. The cycles of heart sounds are certain to follow first-order Gauss–Markov process. These cycles are observed with additional noise for the given measurement. The model is formulated into state-space form to enable use of a Kalman filter to estimate the clean cycles of heart sounds. The estimates obtained by Kalman filtering are optimal in mean squared sense

Low cost negative pressure wound healing device system

Negative Pressure Wound Therapy (NWPT) has been successfully used in treating acute and chronic wound by promoting wound healing. Many medical techniques like NPWT are available in this world but not approachable for many patients due to high in cost and lack of devices. In order for most of the patients accessible to NPWT, an inexpensive NPWT system is explored in this study. Aim of this work is to design a prototype of NPWT system that can generate negative pressure and the negative pressure can be regulated within the range. A NPWT system consists of vacuum pump, drainage tube, wound dressing, fluid collecting canister and adhesive film dressing. In this study, a miniature vacuum pump, canister and Arduino microcontroller were used in order to build up a functional NPWT system. The system has been designed to supply negative pressure from 0 mmHg to 200mmHg and negative pressure which can be controlled. To sum up, this system is able to function according to the require specification and suitable for home healthcare wound healing device with safety precaution implement and system stabilization is improved in future