Analysis of estimation of optical properties of sub superficial structures in multi layered tissue model using distribution function method.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: This paper is focused on the analysis of a method of estimation of the absorption and scattering coefficients of nonhomogeneous two layered structures in time resolved near infrared spectroscopy using method based on cumulative distributions of time of flight of photons. METHODS: The research is based on the analysis of the superposition of cumulative distributions of time of flight of photons. This approach allows for detailed analysis of small variations in characteristics of time of flight of photons caused by an electromagnetic propagation in highly scattering non-homogeneous media. The method presented, based on the variation of statistical minimum distance estimation, is compared to the method of standard curve fitting. It is analyzed by fitting the results obtained from Monte-Carlo simulations of light propagation in the turbid medium to the data from the simulated measurements. RESULTS: The analysis is carried out for a vast range of optical properties of two layered medium in reflectance geometry. CONCLUSIONS: The method allows the estimation of the optical parameters despite the noise in the measured signal, with higher accuracy and generally with smaller number of error function evaluations.

The effect of precordial lead displacement on ECG morphology.

Inaccurate electrode placement and differences in inter-individual human anatomies can lead to misinterpretation of ECG examination. The aim of the study was to investigate the effect of precordial electrodes displacement on morphology of the ECG signal in a group of 60 patients with diagnosed cardiac disease. Shapes of ECG signals recorded from precordial leads were compared with signals interpolated at the points located at a distance up to 5 cm from lead location. Shape differences of the QRS and ST-T-U complexes were quantified using the distribution function method, correlation coefficient, root-mean-square error (RMSE), and normalized RMSE. The relative variability (RV) index was calculated to quantify inter-individual variability. ECG morphology changes were prominent in all shape parameters beyond 2 cm distance to precordial leads. Lead V2 was the most sensitive to displacement errors, followed by leads V3, V1, and V4, for which the direction of electrodes displacement plays a key role. No visible changes in ECG morphology were observed in leads V5 and V6, only scaling effect of signal amplitude. The RV ranged from 0.639 to 0.989. Distortions in ECG tracings increase with the distance from precordial lead, which are specific to chosen electrode, direction of displacement, and for ECG segment selected for calculations.

Ensemble spontaneous activity alterations detected by CISA approach.

In this paper, we propose a method for detecting alterations in the Ensemble Spontaneous Activity (ESA), a random signal representing the composite spontaneous contribution of the auditory nerve recorded on the round window. The proposed method is based on shape analysis of the ESA amplitude histogram. For this task, we use a recent approach, the Corrected Integral Shape Averaging (CISA). Using this approach, a shape clustering algorithm is proposed to classify healthy and pathological ESA signals generated by a recent ESA model. This model allows a precise simulation of neural mechanisms occurring in the auditory nerve. The obtained results demonstrate that this shape analysis is very sensitive for detecting a small number of fibers with correlated firing, supposed to occur during a particular type of tinnitus. In comparison, the classical spectral index fails in this detection.

Body surface ECG signal shape dispersion.

The spatial distribution of the shape of the electrocardiography (ECG) waves obtained by body surface potential mapping (BSPM) is studied, using a 64-channel high-resolution ECG system. The index associated to each lead is the shape difference between its ECG wave and a reference computed taking into account all the leads on the same column. The reference is either a selected real wave or a synthetic signal computed by integral shape averaging (ISA). Better results are obtained with the ISA signal using the distribution function method (DFM) for computing the shape difference. The spatial dispersion of ECG waves is showed to allow the separation of patients after myocardial infarction (MI) from healthy subjects. In addition, the reference signal position for each column is computed. The path linking these positions appears as an invariant, i.e., it is independent of the subject and the ECG wave.

A pseudojoint estimation of time delay and scale factor for M-wave analysis.

A pseudojoint estimation of time scale and time delay between an unknown deterministic transient type signal and a reference signal is proposed. The method is based on the separation between the estimations of the two dependent parameters. The time autocorrelation function (TACF) preserves the time scale and is invariant with respect to the time delay between the signals. The time scale factor can, thus, be estimated independently from time delay using the TACFs of the two signals. After estimating the time scale factor, the signal can be scaled by the estimated amount. The time delay is then estimated without bias due to the time scale factor. To obtain high resolution joint estimates, the time scale factor is estimated in the scale domain from the scale transforms of the TACFs of the two signals. The proposed method has low computational cost. Moreover, the results on synthetic signals show good performance of the method with respect to the Cramér-Rao Lower Bound and the joint Maximum Likelihood Estimation. A possible application of the technique to the analysis of electromyogram (EMG) signals detected during electrically elicited contractions is also presented. In a few representative cases, it is shown that the time scale estimate reveals myoelectric manifestations of muscle fatigue and is less affected by M-wave truncation than spectral EMG attributes.