Measurement of Blood Oxygen based on Remote-Photoplethysmography

SpO2, also known as blood oxygen saturation, is a vital physiological indicator in clinical care. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, silent hypoxia has been one of the most serious symptoms. This symptom makes the patient's SpO2 drop to an extremely low level without discomfort and causes medical care delay for many patients. Therefore, regularly checking our SpO2 has become a very important matter. Recent work has been looking for convenient and contact-free ways to measure SpO2 with cameras. However, most previous studies were not robust enough and didn't evaluate their algorithms on the data with a wide SpO2 range. In this paper, we proposed a novel non-contact method to measure SpO2 by using the weighted K-nearest neighbors (KNN) algorithm. Five features extracted from the RGB traces, POS, and CHROM signals were used in the KNN model. Two datasets using different ways to lower the SpO2 were constructed for evaluating the performance. The first one was collected through the breath-holding experiment, which induces more motion noise and confuses the actual blood oxygen features. The second dataset was collected at Song Syue Lodge, which locates at an elevation of 3150 meters and has lower oxygen concentration in the atmosphere making the SpO2 drop between the range of 80% to 90% without the need of holding breath. The proposed method outperforms the benchmark algorithms on the leave-one-subject-out and cross-dataset validation. © 2022 IEEE.

Addressing Cancer Readmission Prediction Model Drift: A Case Study

The cancer readmission prediction model classifies patients as high-risk or low-risk for readmittance. Consequently, intervention strategies focus on high-risk patients. Nevertheless, the performance of machine learning models generally degrades over time due to changes in the environment that violates models' assumptions, which include statistical data changes and process changes. This research introduces a framework that improves the sensitivity of the cancer readmission prediction model by identifying new features of cancer readmission, such as Diabetes and Anti-Nausea, which potentially cause the model's sensitivity to drift. The proposed model considers these 20 new factors with the 35 original factors that use the most recent dataset to predict cancer readmissions. Recursive feature elimination was used to identify key features. Some of the most popular classification algorithms, which include logistic regression and adaptive boosting, were used to retrain and classify cancer readmissions. The best algorithm was validated on a new dataset that was collected over 11 months, which covered three different waves of Covid-19. The results suggested K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) algorithm performs the best among all eight studied algorithms. The KNN model incorporated new dominant features that did not exist in the original Random Forest (RF) model. The KNN model has an improvement of 8.05% in sensitivity compared to the RF model. The presence of Covid-19 does not have a significant impact on the performance of the KNN model. The suggested framework identifies potential admitted patients for intervention actions, helps reduce cancer readmission rates, costs, and improves the quality of care for cancer patients. © 2022 IISE Annual Conference and Expo 2022. All rights reserved.

Exploring Prediction of COVID-19 and its Severity using Machine Learning

COVID-19 has crippled the lives of millions in the world and is continuously doing so without any sight of relief. Even after the roll out of effective vaccines against COVID-19 and more than half of the population inoculated, it is still a widespread concern. This has led to extensive research around the world regarding the prediction of the COVID-19 disease, its diagnosis, developing drugs for its treatment and its forecasting, etc. Machine Learning has proved its significance in almost every domain and its techniques are also being actively used against COVID-19 by the researchers giving satisfactory results. In this paper, we have highlighted some of the efficient research that have been done using machine learning techniques to predict COVID-19 disease and its severity in patients. The performance of those techniques has been discussed and analyzed. We also carried out a comparative analysis of the most common techniques used in terms of accuracy obtained by them. It has been found that Support Vector Machines, Neural Networks and K-Nearest Neighbor models give the best performance in most of the research works. © 2022 IEEE.