Non-contact real-time estimation of intrapulmonary pressure and tidal volume for chronic heart failure patients.

Long-term continuous patient monitoring is required in many health systems for monitoring and analytical diagnosing purposes. It has been recognized that these types of monitoring systems have shortcomings related to patient comfort and/or functionality. Non-contact monitoring systems have been developed to address some of these shortcomings. One of such systems is non-contact physiological vital signs assessments for Chronic Heart Failure (CHF) patients. This paper presents a novel pulmonary ventilation model that defines the relationship between the intrapulmonary pressure and the chest displacement. A novel intrapulmonary pressure and tidal volume estimation algorithm is also proposed. A database consisting of twenty CHF patients with New York Heart Association (NYHA) Heart Failure Classification Class II & III; whose underwent full Polysomnography (PSG) analysis for diagnosis of sleep apnea, disordered sleep, or both, was selected for the verification of the proposed model and algorithm. The proposed algorithm analyzes the non-contact sensor data and estimate the patient's intrapulmonary pressure and tidal volume. The output of the algorithm is compared with the gold-standard PSG recordings. Across all twenty CHF patients' recordings with mean recorded sleep duration of 7.76 hours, the tidal volume estimation median accuracy achieved 83.13% with a median error of 57.32 milliliters. A potential application would be non-contact continuous monitoring of intrapulmonary pressure and tidal volume during sleep in the home.

Computer aided diagnostic support system for skin cancer: a review of techniques and algorithms.

Image-based computer aided diagnosis systems have significant potential for screening and early detection of malignant melanoma. We review the state of the art in these systems and examine current practices, problems, and prospects of image acquisition, pre-processing, segmentation, feature extraction and selection, and classification of dermoscopic images. This paper reports statistics and results from the most important implementations reported to date. We compared the performance of several classifiers specifically developed for skin lesion diagnosis and discussed the corresponding findings. Whenever available, indication of various conditions that affect the technique's performance is reported. We suggest a framework for comparative assessment of skin cancer diagnostic models and review the results based on these models. The deficiencies in some of the existing studies are highlighted and suggestions for future research are provided.