Healthcare Technology Letters
Volume 3, Issue 1, March 2016
Volumes & issues:
Volume 3, Issue 1
March 2016
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- Author(s): Panagiotis D. Bamidis
- Source: Healthcare Technology Letters, Volume 3, Issue 1, page: 1 –1
- DOI: 10.1049/htl.2016.0013
- Type: Article
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- Author(s): Christopher J. Clewett ; Phillip Langley ; Anthony D. Bateson ; Aziz Asghar ; Antony J. Wilkinson
- Source: Healthcare Technology Letters, Volume 3, Issue 1, p. 2 –5
- DOI: 10.1049/htl.2015.0037
- Type: Article
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Aims: Hypoglycaemia unawareness is a common condition associated with increased risk of severe hypoglycaemia. The purpose of the authors’ study was to develop a simple to use, home-based and non-invasive hypoglycaemia warning system based on electroencephalography (EEG), and to demonstrate its use in a single-case feasibility study. Methods: A participant with type 1 diabetes forms a single-person case study where blood sugar levels and EEG were recorded. EEG was recorded using skin surface electrodes placed behind the ear located within the T3 region by the participant in the home. EEG was analysed retrospectively to develop an algorithm which would trigger a warning if EEG changes associated with hypoglycaemia onset were detected. Results: All hypoglycaemia events were detected by the EEG hypoglycaemia warning algorithm. Warnings were triggered with blood glucose concentration levels at or below 4.2 mmol/l in this participant and no warnings were issued when in euglycaemia. Conclusion: The feasibility of a non-invasive EEG-based hypoglycaemia warning system for personal monitoring in the home has been demonstrated in a single case study. The results suggest that further studies are warranted to evaluate the system prospectively in a larger group of participants.
- Author(s): Greet Baldewijns ; Glen Debard ; Gert Mertes ; Bart Vanrumste ; Tom Croonenborghs
- Source: Healthcare Technology Letters, Volume 3, Issue 1, p. 6 –11
- DOI: 10.1049/htl.2015.0047
- Type: Article
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Fall incidents are an important health hazard for older adults. Automatic fall detection systems can reduce the consequences of a fall incident by assuring that timely aid is given. The development of these systems is therefore getting a lot of research attention. Real-life data which can help evaluate the results of this research is however sparse. Moreover, research groups that have this type of data are not at liberty to share it. Most research groups thus use simulated datasets. These simulation datasets, however, often do not incorporate the challenges the fall detection system will face when implemented in real-life. In this Letter, a more realistic simulation dataset is presented to fill this gap between real-life data and currently available datasets. It was recorded while re-enacting real-life falls recorded during previous studies. It incorporates the challenges faced by fall detection algorithms in real life. A fall detection algorithm from Debard et al. was evaluated on this dataset. This evaluation showed that the dataset possesses extra challenges compared with other publicly available datasets. In this Letter, the dataset is discussed as well as the results of this preliminary evaluation of the fall detection algorithm. The dataset can be downloaded from www.kuleuven.be/advise/datasets.
- Author(s): Yangzhe Liao ; Mark S. Leeson ; Matthew D. Higgins
- Source: Healthcare Technology Letters, Volume 3, Issue 1, p. 12 –15
- DOI: 10.1049/htl.2015.0049
- Type: Article
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Wireless body area sensor networks (WBASNs) are becoming an increasingly significant breakthrough technology for smart healthcare systems, enabling improved clinical decision-making in daily medical care. Recently, radio frequency ultra-wideband technology has developed substantially for physiological signal monitoring due to its advantages such as low-power consumption, high transmission data rate, and miniature antenna size. Applications of future ubiquitous healthcare systems offer the prospect of collecting human vital signs, early detection of abnormal medical conditions, real-time healthcare data transmission and remote telemedicine support. However, due to the technical constraints of sensor batteries, the supply of power is a major bottleneck for healthcare system design. Moreover, medium access control (MAC) needs to support reliable transmission links that allow sensors to transmit data safely and stably. In this Letter, the authors provide a flexible quality of service model for ad hoc networks that can support fast data transmission, adaptive schedule MAC control, and energy efficient ubiquitous WBASN networks. Results show that the proposed multi-hop communication ad hoc network model can balance information packet collisions and power consumption. Additionally, wireless communications link in WBASNs can effectively overcome multi-user interference and offer high transmission data rates for healthcare systems.
- Author(s): Aristos Aristodimou ; Athos Antoniades ; Constantinos S. Pattichis
- Source: Healthcare Technology Letters, Volume 3, Issue 1, p. 16 –21
- DOI: 10.1049/htl.2015.0050
- Type: Article
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In healthcare, there is a vast amount of patients’ data, which can lead to important discoveries if combined. Due to legal and ethical issues, such data cannot be shared and hence such information is underused. A new area of research has emerged, called privacy preserving data publishing (PPDP), which aims in sharing data in a way that privacy is preserved while the information lost is kept at a minimum. In this Letter, a new anonymisation algorithm for PPDP is proposed, which is based on k-anonymity through pattern-based multidimensional suppression (kPB-MS). The algorithm uses feature selection for reducing the data dimensionality and then combines attribute and record suppression for obtaining k-anonymity. Five datasets from different areas of life sciences [RETINOPATHY, Single Proton Emission Computed Tomography imaging, gene sequencing and drug discovery (two datasets)], were anonymised with kPB-MS. The produced anonymised datasets were evaluated using four different classifiers and in 74% of the test cases, they produced similar or better accuracies than using the full datasets.
- Author(s): Philippe Finet ; Bernard Gibaud ; Olivier Dameron ; Régine Le Bouquin Jeannès
- Source: Healthcare Technology Letters, Volume 3, Issue 1, p. 22 –26
- DOI: 10.1049/htl.2015.0053
- Type: Article
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The number of patients with complications associated with chronic diseases increases with the ageing population. In particular, complex chronic wounds raise the re-admission rate in hospitals. In this context, the implementation of a telemedicine application in Basse-Normandie, France, contributes to reduce hospital stays and transport. This application requires a new collaboration among general practitioners, private duty nurses and the hospital staff. However, the main constraint mentioned by the users of this system is the lack of interoperability between the information system of this application and various partners’ information systems. To improve medical data exchanges, the authors propose a new implementation based on the introduction of interoperable clinical documents and a digital document repository for managing the sharing of the documents between the telemedicine application users. They then show that this technical solution is suitable for any telemedicine application and any document sharing system in a healthcare facility or network.
- Author(s): Vasileios S. Charisis and Leontios J. Hadjileontiadis
- Source: Healthcare Technology Letters, Volume 3, Issue 1, p. 27 –33
- DOI: 10.1049/htl.2015.0055
- Type: Article
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The aim of this Letter is to present a new capsule endoscopy (CE) image analysis scheme for the detection of small bowel ulcers that relate to Crohn's disease. More specifically, this scheme is based on: (i) a hybrid adaptive filtering (HAF) process, that utilises genetic algorithms to the curvelet-based representation of images for efficient extraction of the lesion-related morphological characteristics, (ii) differential lacunarity (DL) analysis for texture feature extraction from the HAF-filtered images and (iii) support vector machines for robust classification performance. For the training of the proposed scheme, namely HAF-DL, an 800-image database was used and the evaluation was based on ten 30-second long endoscopic videos. Experimental results, along with comparison with other related efforts, have shown that the HAF-DL approach evidently outperforms the latter in the field of CE image analysis for automated lesion detection, providing higher classification results. The promising performance of HAF-DL paves the way for a complete computer-aided diagnosis system that could support the physicians’ clinical practice.
- Author(s): Andreas Menychtas ; Panayiotis Tsanakas ; Ilias Maglogiannis
- Source: Healthcare Technology Letters, Volume 3, Issue 1, p. 34 –40
- DOI: 10.1049/htl.2015.0054
- Type: Article
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The proper acquisition of biosignals data from various biosensor devices and their remote accessibility are still issues that prevent the wide adoption of point-of-care systems in the routine of monitoring chronic patients. This Letter presents an advanced framework for enabling patient monitoring that utilises a cloud computing infrastructure for data management and analysis. The framework introduces also a local mechanism for uniform biosignals collection from wearables and biosignal sensors, and decision support modules, in order to enable prompt and essential decisions. A prototype smartphone application and the related cloud modules have been implemented for demonstrating the value of the proposed framework. Initial results regarding the performance of the system and the effectiveness in data management and decision-making have been quite encouraging.
- Author(s): Christos A. Frantzidis ; Sotiria Gilou ; Antonis Billis ; Maria Karagianni ; Charalampos D. Bratsas ; Panagiotis Bamidis
- Source: Healthcare Technology Letters, Volume 3, Issue 1, p. 41 –45
- DOI: 10.1049/htl.2015.0060
- Type: Article
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Recent neuroscientific studies focused on the identification of pathological neurophysiological patterns (emotions, geriatric depression, memory impairment and sleep disturbances) through computerised clinical decision-support systems. Almost all these research attempts employed either resting-state condition (e.g. eyes-closed) or event-related potentials extracted during a cognitive task known to be affected by the disease under consideration. This Letter reviews existing data mining techniques and aims to enhance their robustness by proposing a holistic decision framework dealing with comorbidities and early symptoms’ identification, while it could be applied in realistic occasions. Multivariate features are elicited and fused in order to be compared with average activities characteristic of each neuropathology group. A proposed model of the specific cognitive function which may be based on previous findings (a priori information) and/or validated by current experimental data should be then formed. So, the proposed scheme facilitates the early identification and prevention of neurodegenerative phenomena. Neurophysiological semantic annotation is hypothesised to enhance the importance of the proposed framework in facilitating the personalised healthcare of the information society and medical informatics research community.
- Author(s): Antonis S. Billis ; Asterios Batziakas ; Charalampos Bratsas ; Marianna S. Tsatali ; Maria Karagianni ; Panagiotis D. Bamidis
- Source: Healthcare Technology Letters, Volume 3, Issue 1, p. 46 –50
- DOI: 10.1049/htl.2015.0056
- Type: Article
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Smart monitoring of seniors behavioural patterns and more specifically activities of daily living have attracted immense research interest in recent years. Development of smart decision support systems to support the promotion of health smart homes has also emerged taking advantage of the plethora of smart, inexpensive and unobtrusive monitoring sensors, devices and software tools. To this end, a smart monitoring system has been used in order to extract meaningful information about television (TV) usage patterns and subsequently associate them with clinical findings of experts. The smart TV operating state remote monitoring system was installed in four elderly women homes and gathered data for more than 11 months. Results suggest that TV daily usage (time the TV is turned on) can predict mental health change. Conclusively, the authors suggest that collection of smart device usage patterns could strengthen the inference capabilities of existing health DSSs applied in uncontrolled settings such as real senior homes.
- Author(s): Isabelle Killane ; Imran Sulaiman ; Elaine MacHale ; Aoife Breathnach ; Terence E. Taylor ; Martin S. Holmes ; Richard B. Reilly ; Richard W. Costello
- Source: Healthcare Technology Letters, Volume 3, Issue 1, p. 51 –55
- DOI: 10.1049/htl.2015.0058
- Type: Article
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This Letter investigated the efficacy of a decision-support system, designed for respiratory medicine, at predicting asthma exacerbations in a multi-site longitudinal randomised control trial. Adherence to inhaler medication was acquired over 3 months from patients with asthma employing a dose counter and a remote monitoring adherence device which recorded participant's inhaler use: n = 184 (23,656 audio files), 61% women, age (mean ± sd) 49.3 ± 16.4. Data on occurrence of exacerbations was collected at three clinical visits, 1 month apart. The relative risk of an asthma exacerbation for those with good and poor adherence was examined employing a univariate and multivariate modified Poisson regression approach; adjusting for age, gender and body mass index. For all months dose counter adherence was significantly (p < 0.01) higher than remote monitoring adherence. Overall, those with poor adherence had a 1.38 ± 0.34 and 1.42 ± 0.39 (remotely monitored) and 1.25 ± 0.32 and 1.18 ± 0.31 (dose counter) higher relative risk of an exacerbation in model 1 and model 2, respectively. However, this was not found to be statistically significantly different. Remotely monitored adherence holds important clinical information and future research should focus on refining adherence and exacerbation measures. Decision-support systems based on remote monitoring may enhance patient–physician communication, possibly reducing preventable adverse events.
- Author(s): Stathis Th. Konstantinidis and Panagiotis D. Bamidis
- Source: Healthcare Technology Letters, Volume 3, Issue 1, p. 56 –60
- DOI: 10.1049/htl.2015.0057
- Type: Article
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During the last decades, the inclusion of digital tools in health education has rapidly lead to a continuously enlarging digital era. All the online interactions between learners and tutors, the description, creation, reuse and sharing of educational digital resources and the interlinkage between them in conjunction with cheap storage technology has led to an enormous amount of educational data. Medical education is a unique type of education due to accuracy of information needed, continuous changing competences required and alternative methods of education used. Nowadays medical education standards provide the ground for organising the educational data and the paradata. Analysis of such education data through education data mining techniques is in its infancy, but decision support systems (DSSs) for medical education need further research. To the best of our knowledge, there is a gap and a clear need for identifying the challenges for DSSs in medical education in the era of medical education standards. Thus, in this Letter the role and the attributes of such a DSS for medical education are delineated and the challenges and vision for future actions are identified.
Editorial
Non-invasive, home-based electroencephalography hypoglycaemia warning system for personal monitoring using skin surface electrodes: a single-case feasibility study
Bridging the gap between real-life data and simulated data by providing a highly realistic fall dataset for evaluating camera-based fall detection algorithms
Flexible quality of service model for wireless body area sensor networks
Privacy preserving data publishing of categorical data through k-anonymity and feature selection
Relevance of health level 7 clinical document architecture and integrating the healthcare enterprise cross-enterprise document sharing profile for managing chronic wounds in a telemedicine context
Use of adaptive hybrid filtering process in Crohn's disease lesion detection from real capsule endoscopy videos
Automated integration of wireless biosignal collection devices for patient-centred decision-making in point-of-care systems
Future perspectives toward the early definition of a multivariate decision-support scheme employed in clinical decision making for senior citizens
Enabling active and healthy ageing decision support systems with the smart collection of TV usage patterns
Predicting asthma exacerbations employing remotely monitored adherence
Why decision support systems are important for medical education
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- Author(s): R.K. Tripathy ; L.N. Sharma ; S. Dandapat
- Source: Healthcare Technology Letters, Volume 3, Issue 1, p. 61 –66
- DOI: 10.1049/htl.2015.0011
- Type: Article
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In this Letter, a novel principal component (PC)-based diagnostic measure (PCDM) is proposed to quantify loss of clinical components in the multi-lead electrocardiogram (MECG) signals. The analysis of MECG shows that, the clinical components are captured in few PCs. The proposed diagnostic measure is defined as the sum of weighted percentage root mean square difference (PRD) between the PCs of original and processed MECG signals. The values of the weight depend on the clinical importance of PCs. The PCDM is tested over MECG enhancement and a novel MECG data reduction scheme. The proposed measure is compared with weighted diagnostic distortion, wavelet energy diagnostic distortion and PRD. The qualitative evaluation is performed using Spearman rank-order correlation coefficient (SROCC) and Pearson linear correlation coefficient. The simulation result demonstrates that the PCDM performs better to quantify loss of clinical components in MECG and shows a SROCC value of 0.9686 with subjective measure.
- Author(s): Salim Lahmiri
- Source: Healthcare Technology Letters, Volume 3, Issue 1, p. 67 –71
- DOI: 10.1049/htl.2015.0007
- Type: Article
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Hybridisation of the bi-dimensional empirical mode decomposition (BEMD) with denoising techniques has been proposed in the literature as an effective approach for image denoising. In this Letter, the Student's probability density function is introduced in the computation of the mean envelope of the data during the BEMD sifting process to make it robust to values that are far from the mean. The resulting BEMD is denoted tBEMD. In order to show the effectiveness of the tBEMD, several image denoising techniques in tBEMD domain are employed; namely, fourth order partial differential equation (PDE), linear complex diffusion process (LCDP), non-linear complex diffusion process (NLCDP), and the discrete wavelet transform (DWT). Two biomedical images and a standard digital image were considered for experiments. The original images were corrupted with additive Gaussian noise with three different levels. Based on peak-signal-to-noise ratio, the experimental results show that PDE, LCDP, NLCDP, and DWT all perform better in the tBEMD than in the classical BEMD domain. It is also found that tBEMD is faster than classical BEMD when the noise level is low. When it is high, the computational cost in terms of processing time is similar. The effectiveness of the presented approach makes it promising for clinical applications.
- Author(s): Osman O. Rakibet ; Robert J. Horne ; Stephen W. Kelly ; John C. Batchelor
- Source: Healthcare Technology Letters, Volume 3, Issue 1, p. 72 –76
- DOI: 10.1049/htl.2015.0042
- Type: Article
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Tongue control with low profile, passive mouth tags is demonstrated as a human–device interface by communicating values of tongue-tag separation over a wireless link. Confusion matrices are provided to demonstrate user accuracy in targeting by tongue position. Accuracy is found to increase dramatically after short training sequences with errors falling close to 1% in magnitude with zero missed targets. The rate at which users are able to learn accurate targeting with high accuracy indicates that this is an intuitive device to operate. The significance of the work is that innovative very unobtrusive, wireless tags can be used to provide intuitive human–computer interfaces based on low cost and disposable mouth mounted technology. With the development of an appropriate reading system, control of assistive devices such as computer mice or wheelchairs could be possible for tetraplegics and others who retain fine motor control capability of their tongues. The tags contain no battery and are intended to fit directly on the hard palate, detecting tongue position in the mouth with no need for tongue piercings.
- Author(s): Sanjeev Kumar Jain and Basabi Bhaumik
- Source: Healthcare Technology Letters, Volume 3, Issue 1, p. 77 –84
- DOI: 10.1049/htl.2015.0030
- Type: Article
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A novel algorithm based on forward search is developed for real-time electrocardiogram (ECG) signal processing and implemented in application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for QRS complex related cardiovascular disease diagnosis. The authors have evaluated their algorithm using MIT-BIH database and achieve sensitivity of 99.86% and specificity of 99.93% for QRS complex peak detection. In this Letter, Physionet PTB diagnostic ECG database is used for QRS complex related disease detection. An ASIC for cardiovascular disease detection is fabricated using 130-nm CMOS high-speed process technology. The area of the ASIC is 0.5 mm2. The power dissipation is 1.73 μW at the operating frequency of 1 kHz with a supply voltage of 0.6 V. The output from the ASIC is fed to their Android application that generates diagnostic report and can be sent to a cardiologist through email. Their ASIC result shows average failed detection rate of 0.16% for six leads data of 290 patients in PTB diagnostic ECG database. They also have implemented a low-leakage version of their ASIC. The ASIC dissipates only 45 pJ with a supply voltage of 0.9 V. Their proposed ASIC is most suitable for energy efficient telemetry cardiovascular disease detection system.
- Author(s): Mohammad Hossein Ramezani and Esmaeil S. Nadimi
- Source: Healthcare Technology Letters, Volume 3, Issue 1, p. 85 –91
- DOI: 10.1049/htl.2015.0036
- Type: Article
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In this Letter, a non-invasive method for thickness estimation of the subcutaneous fat layer of abdominal wall is presented by using a coaxial probe. Fat layer has the highest impact on the averaged attenuation parameter of the abdominal wall due to its high thickness and low permittivity. The abdominal wall is modelled as a multi-layer medium and an analytical model for the probe is derived by calculation of its aperture admittance facing to this multi-layer medium. The performance of this model is then validated by a numerical simulation using finite-difference-time-domain (FDTD) analysis. Simulation results show the high impact of the probe dimension and fat layer thickness on the sensitivity of the measured permittivity. The authors further investigate this sensitivity by statistical analysis of the permittivity variations. Finally, measuring in different locations relative to the body surface is presented as a solution to estimate the fat layer thickness in the presence of uncertainty of model parameters.
Diagnostic measure to quantify loss of clinical components in multi-lead electrocardiogram
Image denoising in bidimensional empirical mode decomposition domain: the role of Student's probability distribution function
Passive wireless tags for tongue controlled assistive technology interfaces
An Energy efficient application specific integrated circuit for electrocardiogram feature detection and its potential for ambulatory cardiovascular disease detection
Thickness estimation of the subcutaneous fat using coaxial probe
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