Echography imaging is an important technique frequently used in medical diagnostics due to low-cost, non-ionising characteristics, and pragmatic convenience. Due to the shortage of skilful technicians and injuries of physicians sustained from diagnosing several patients, robot-assisted echography (RAE) system is gaining great attention in recent decades. A thorough study of the recent research advances in the field of perception, control and cognition techniques used in RAE systems is presented in this study. This survey introduces the representative system structure, applications and projects, and products. Challenges and key technological issues faced by the traditional RAE system and how the current artificial intelligence and cobots attempt to overcome these issues are summarised. Furthermore, significant future research directions in this field have been identified by this study as cognitive computing, operational skills transfer, and commercially feasible system design.

The pressing demand for workload along with social media interaction leads to diminished alertness during work hours. Researchers attempted to measure alertness level from various cues like EEG, EOG, video-based eye movement analysis, etc. Among these, video-based eyelid and iris motion tracking gained much attention in recent years. However, most of these implementations are tested on video data of subjects without spectacles. These videos do not pose a challenge for eye detection and tracking. In this work, the authors have designed an experiment to yield a video database of 58 human subjects wearing spectacles and are at different levels of alertness. Along with spectacles, they introduced variation in session, recording frame rate (fps), illumination, and time of the experiment. They carried out an analysis to detect the reliableness of facial and ocular features like yawning and eye-blinks in the context of alertness level detection capability. Also, they observe the influence of spectacles on ocular feature detection performance under spectacles and propose a simple preprocessing step to alleviate the specular reflection problem. Extensive experiments on real-world images demonstrate that the authors’ approach achieves desirable reflection suppression results within minimum execution time compared to the state-of-the-art.

For patients with ankle injuries, rehabilitation training is an important and effective way to help patients restore their ankle complex's motor abilities. Aiming to improve the accuracy and performance of ankle rehabilitation, the authors focus on the control strategies of the developed parallel ankle rehabilitation robot with novel 2-UPS/RRR mechanism. Firstly, the kinematics model of the mechanism is established, and they deduce the inverse solution of positions as well as the velocity mapping between the driving speed and the robot's angular velocity, based on which they realise the trajectory tracking control in the process of passive rehabilitation training. Secondly, they set up experiments to determine the torque threshold that can be used to detect the motion intention of ankle joint, and then they propose the active rehabilitation training strategy according to the motion intention detection. Finally, experiments were carried out with healthy subjects, with results showing that the trajectory tracking error during passive rehabilitation training is very small, and the moving platform of the ankle rehabilitation robot can drive the ankle joint to the detected motion intention direction at a constant speed flexibly and smoothly, which verifies the effectiveness of the control strategies for ankle rehabilitation training.

This study aims to offer multiple-model informed predictions of COVID-19 in Canada, specifically through the use of deep learning strategy and mathematical prediction models including long-short term memory network, logistic regression model, Gaussian model, and susceptible-infected-removed model. Using the published data as of the 10th of April 2020, the authors forecast that the daily increased number of infective cases in Canada has not reached the peak turning point and will continue to increase. Therefore, Canada's healthcare services need to be ready for the magnitude of this pandemic.

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder and generally detected by electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. The manual inspection of epileptic seizures is a time-consuming and laborious process. Extensive automatic detection algorithms were proposed by using traditional approaches, which show good accuracy for several specific EEG classification problems but perform poorly in others. To address this issue, the authors present a novel model, named SeizureNet, for robust detection of epileptic seizures using EEG signals based on convolutional neural network. Firstly, they utilise two convolutional neural networks to extract time-invariant features from single-channel EEG signals. Then, a fully connected layer is employed to learn high-level features. Finally, these features are supplied to a softmax layer to classify. They evaluated the model on a benchmark database provided by the University of Bonn and adopted a ten-fold cross-validation approach. The proposed model has achieved the accuracy of 98.50–100.00% in classifying non-seizure and seizure, 97.00–99.00% in classifying healthy, inter-ictal and ictal, and 95.84% in classifying among five-class EEG states.

In this study, the manoeuvering target tracking problem is addressed by using the unbiased converted measurements from a two-dimensional radar system. Due to the fact that radar measurements are usually expressed in polar coordinates while the target motion is described in the Cartesian coordinates, the unbiased converted measurements are utilised to linearise the system model of the manoeuvering target tracking problem in the Cartesian coordinates. The manoeuver acceleration is modelled as the unknown input of the constant velocity kinematic model of the target. First, it is pointed out that the converted measurement noise no longer satisfies Gaussian distribution, even if the raw radar measurement noise is Gaussian noise. In order to solve the manoeuvering target tracking problem with non-Gaussian disturbances, a joint estimation method for the target state and the unknown input is presented under the maximum correntropy criterion. In the simulation, the proposed manoeuvering target tracking method is compared with the one developed on the basis of the traditional Kalman filter. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the method proposed in this study.