Journal of Healthcare Engineering

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is one of the most severe diseases threatening human life. Electrocardiogram (ECG) is an effective way to detect CVD. In recent years, many methods have been proposed to detect arrhythmia using 12-lead ECG. In particular, deep learning methods have been proven to be effective and have been widely used. The attention mechanism has attracted extensive attention in many fields in a series of deep learning methods. Off-the-shelf solutions based on deep learning and attention mechanism for ECG classification mostly give weights to time points. None of the existing methods were considered using the attention mechanism dealing with ECG signals at the level of heartbeats. In this paper, we propose a beat-level fusion net (BLF-Net) for multiclass arrhythmia classification by assigning weights at the heartbeat level, according to the contribution of the heartbeat to diagnostic results. This algorithm consists of three steps: (1) segmenting the long ECG signal into short beats; (2) using a neural network to extract features from heartbeats; and (3) assigning weights to features extracted from heartbeats using an attention mechanism. We test our algorithm on the PTB-XL database and have superiority over state-of-the-art performance on six classification tasks. Besides, the principle of this architecture is clarified by visualizing the weight of the attention mechanism. The proposed BLF-Net is shown to be useful and automatically provides an effective network structure for arrhythmia classification, which is capable of aiding cardiologists in arrhythmia diagnosis.

Computed tomography (CT) has been regarded as the most effective modality for characterizing and quantifying chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Therefore, chest CT images should provide more information for COPD diagnosis, such as COPD stage classification. This paper proposes a features combination strategy by concatenating three-dimension (3D) CNN features and lung radiomics features for COPD stage classification based on the multi-layer perceptron (MLP) classifier. First, 465 sets of chest HRCT images are automatically segmented by a trained ResU-Net, obtaining the lung images with the Hounsfield unit. Second, the 3D CNN features are extracted from the lung region images based on a truncated transfer learning strategy. Then, the lung radiomics features are extracted from the lung region images by PyRadiomics. Third, the MLP classifier with the best classification performance is determined by the 3D CNN features and the lung radiomics features. Finally, the proposed combined feature vector is used to improve the MLP classifier’s performance. The results show that compared with CNN models and other ML classifiers, the MLP classifier with the best classification performance is determined. The MLP classifier with the proposed combined feature vector has achieved accuracy, mean precision, mean recall, mean F1-score, and AUC of 0.879, 0.879, 0.879, 0.875, and 0.971, respectively. Compared to the MLP classifier with the 3D CNN features selected by Lasso, our method based on the MLP classifier has improved the classification performance by 5.8% (accuracy), 5.3% (mean precision), 5.8% (mean recall), 5.4% (mean F1-score), and 2.5% (AUC). Compared to the MLP classifier with lung radiomics features selected by Lasso, our method based on the MLP classifier has improved the classification performance by 5.0% (accuracy), 5.1% (mean precision), 5.0% (mean recall), 5.1% (mean F1-score), and 2.1% (AUC). Therefore, it is concluded that our method is effective in improving the classification performance for COPD stage classification.

The major issue faced by elderly people in society is the loss of memory, difficulty learning new things, and poor judgment. This is due to damage to brain tissues, which may lead to cognitive impairment and eventually Alzheimer’s. Therefore, the detection of such mild cognitive impairment (MCI) becomes important. Usually, this is detected when it is converted into Alzheimer’s disease (AD). AD is irreversible and cannot be cured whereas mild cognitive impairment (MCI) can be cured. The goal of this research is to diagnose Alzheimer’s patients for timely treatment. For this purpose, functional MRI images from the publicly available dataset are used. Various deep-learning models have been used by the scientific community for the automatic detection of Alzheimer’s subjects. These include the binary classification of scans of patients into MCI and AD stages, and limited work is carried out for multiclass classification of Alzheimer’s disease up to six different stages. This study is divided into two steps. In the first step, a binary classification of the subject’s scan is performed using Custom CNN. The second step involves the use of different deep learning models along with Custom CNN for multiclass classification of a subject’s scan into one of the six stages of Alzheimer’s disease. The models are evaluated based on different evaluation metrics, and the overall result of the models is improved using the max-voting ensembling technique. The experimental results show that an overall average accuracy of 98.8% is achieved for Alzheimer’s stages classification.

Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is a technology for filming the gastrointestinal (GI) tract to find abnormalities such as tumors, polyps, and bleeding. This paper proposes a new method based on hand-crafted features to detect polyps in WCE frames. A polyp has a convex surface containing pixel values with a specified Gaussian distribution. If a polyp exists in the WCE image, edges will be seen at the border of the occupied area. Since WCE images often suffer from low illumination, a histogram equalization (HE) technique can be used to enhance the image. In this paper, we initially find probable polyp edges via thresholding. Then, we use the edges to find the region of interest (ROI). Then, the mean, standard deviation (STD), and division of mean by STD from the ROI are computed as features to discriminate between polyp and nonpolyp using a support vector machine (SVM). The evaluation results on the Kvasir-Capsule dataset show 99% accuracy for the proposed method in polyp detection. Furthermore, the proposed method runs at a real-time speed of ∼0.031 seconds detection for each image.

Objects. Sleep and mood disorders are frequently observed in perimenopausal women, which may be associated with the changes of melatonin concentrations. Therefore, this study aimed at probing into the impact of melatonin on the improvement of sleep, mood symptoms, and quality of life (QoL) in perimenopausal women. Method. 100 healthy perimenopausal women were recruited and randomly assigned to two groups, with 50 subjects in each group. In the control group, placebo was administrated daily for 3 cycles (4 weeks of treatment for 1 cycle and drug withdrawals for 1 week). The study group received 3 mg oral melatonin treatment daily in the same period of time. All subjects completed the study. We compared the uterine volume, endometrial thickness, LH (luteinizing hormone), FSH (follicle generating hormone), E2 (estradiol), and melatonin levels during daytime between the two groups before and after the study. Moreover, perimenopause syndrome, sleep, mood, and QoL were analyzed at the baseline and 3 cycles by the questionnaires of the Kupperman index, the Pittsburgh sleep quality index (PSQI), the Hamilton anxiety scale (HAMA), and the Hamilton depression scale (HAMD), as well as menopausal QoL (MENQOL), respectively. Any adverse reactions experienced by the subjects were also compared in the study. Finally, 91 participants (92%) completed the whole study, 47 and 44 in the study and control groups, respectively, and their data were considered in subsequent analyses. Results. After therapy, the two groups were similar in the uterine volume and endometrial thickness. In contrast to the control group, the study group showed notably decreased LH and FSH levels. No notable difference was discovered in E2 and melatonin levels between the two groups in the study. Moreover, the study group exhibited a significantly lower score in the Kupperman index, PSQI, HAMA, HAMD, and MENQOL scale than the control group. Moreover, the two groups had no notable difference in adverse reactions. Conclusion. Melatonin was a useful treatment to relieve climacteric symptoms and improve sleep, mood, and life quality in perimenopausal women without obvious adverse reactions.

In recent years, Internet of Things (IoT) and advanced sensor technologies have gained considerable interest in linking different medical devices, patients, and healthcare professionals to improve the quality of medical services in a cost-effective manner. The evolution of the smart healthcare sector has considerably enhanced patient safety, accessibility, and operational competence while minimizing the costs incurred in healthcare services. In this background, the current study develops intelligent energy-aware thermal exchange optimization with deep learning (IEA-TEODL) model for IoT-enabled smart healthcare. The aim of the proposed IEA-TOEDL technique is to group the IoT devices into clusters and make decisions in the smart healthcare sector. The proposed IEA-TEODL technique constructs clusters using the energy-aware chaotic thermal exchange optimization-based clustering (EACTEO-C) scheme. In addition, the disease diagnosis model also intends to classify the collected healthcare data as either presence or absence of the disease. To accomplish this, the proposed IEA-TODL technique involves several subprocesses such as preprocessing, K-medoid clustering-based outlier removal, multihead attention bidirectional long short-term memory (MHA-BLSTM), and weighted salp swarm algorithm (WSSA). The utilization of outlier removal and WSSA-based hyperparameter tuning process assist in achieving enhanced classification outcomes. In order to demonstrate the enhanced outcomes of the IEA-TEODL approach, a wide range of simulations was conducted against benchmark datasets. The simulation results inferred the enhanced outcomes of the IEA-TEODL technique over recent techniques under distinct evaluation metrics.