Background Accurate prediction of motor recovery after stroke is critical for treatment decisions and planning. Machine learning has been proposed to be a promising technique for outcome prediction because of its high accuracy and ability to process large volumes of data. It has been used to predict acute stroke recovery; however, whether machine learning would be effective for predicting rehabilitation outcomes in chronic stroke patients for common contemporary task-oriented interventions remains largely unexplored. This study aimed to determine the accuracy and performance of machine learning to predict clinically significant motor function improvements after contemporary task-oriented intervention in chronic stroke patients and identify important predictors for building machine learning prediction models. Methods This study was a secondary analysis of data using two common machine learning approaches, which were the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) and artificial neural network (ANN). Chronic stroke patients (N = 239) that received 30 h of task-oriented training including the constraint-induced movement therapy, bilateral arm training, robot-assisted therapy and mirror therapy were included. The Fugl-Meyer assessment scale (FMA) was the main outcome. Potential predictors include age, gender, side of lesion, time since stroke, baseline functional status, motor function and quality of life. We divided the data set into a training set and a test set and used the cross-validation procedure to construct machine learning models based on the training set. After the models were built, we used the test data set to evaluate the accuracy and prediction performance of the models. Results Three important predictors were identified, which were time since stroke, baseline functional independence measure (FIM) and baseline FMA scores. Models for predicting motor function improvements were accurate. The prediction accuracy of the KNN model was 85.42% and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC) was 0.89. The prediction accuracy of the ANN model was 81.25% and the AUC-ROC was 0.77. Conclusions Incorporating machine learning into clinical outcome prediction using three key predictors including time since stroke, baseline functional and motor ability may help clinicians/therapists to identify patients that are most likely to benefit from contemporary task-oriented interventions. The KNN and ANN models may be potentially useful for predicting clinically significant motor recovery in chronic stroke.

Use of information and communication technology such as smart phone, smart watch, smart glass and portable health monitoring devices for healthcare services has made Mobile Health (mHealth) an emerging research area. Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) is considered as a leading cause of death world wide and an increasing number of people die prematurely due to CHD. Under such circumstances, there is a growing demand for a reliable cardiac monitoring system to catch the intermittent abnormalities and detect critical cardiac behaviors which lead to sudden death. Use of mobile devices to collect Electrocardiography (ECG), Seismocardiography (SCG) data and efficient analysis of those data can monitor a patient’s cardiac activities for early warning. This paper presents a novel cardiac data acquisition method and combined analysis of Electrocardiography (ECG) and multi channel Seismocardiography (SCG) data. An early warning system is implemented to monitor the cardiac activities of a person and accuracy assessment of the early warning system is conducted for the ECG data only. The assessment shows 88% accuracy and effectiveness of our proposed analysis, which implies the viability and applicability of the proposed early warning system.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a major public concern and socioeconomic problem across the globe. The popular high-end cardiac health monitoring systems such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computerized tomography scan (CT scan), and echocardiography (Echo) are highly expensive and do not support long-term continuous monitoring of patients without disrupting their activities of daily living (ADL). In this paper, the continuous and non-invasive cardiac health monitoring using unobtrusive sensors is explored aiming to provide a feasible and low-cost alternative to foresee possible cardiac anomalies in an early stage. It is learned that cardiac health monitoring based on sole usage of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals may not provide powerful insights as ECG provides shallow information on various cardiac activities in the form of electrical impulses only. Hence, a novel low-cost, non-invasive seismocardiogram (SCG) signal along with ECG signals are jointly investigated for the robust cardiac health monitoring. For this purpose, the in-laboratory data collection model is designed for simultaneous acquisition of ECG and SCG signals followed by mechanisms for the automatic delineation of relevant feature points in acquired ECG and SCG signals. In addition, separate feature points based novel approach is adopted to distinguish between normal and abnormal morphology in each ECG and SCG cardiac cycle. Finally, a combined analysis of ECG and SCG is carried out by designing a Naïve Bayes conditional probability model. Experiments on Institutional Review Board (IRB) approved licensed ECG/SCG signals acquired from real subjects containing 12,000 cardiac cycles show that the proposed feature point delineation mechanisms and abnormal morphology detection methods consistently perform well and give promising results. In addition, experimental results show that the combined analysis of ECG and SCG signals provide more reliable cardiac health monitoring compared to the standalone use of ECG and SCG.

In recent years, cardiovascular diseases are on the rise, and they entail enormous health burdens on global economies. Cardiac vibrations yield a wide and rich spectrum of essential information regarding the functioning of the heart, and thus it is necessary to take advantage of this data to better monitor cardiac health by way of prevention in early stages. Specifically, seismocardiography (SCG) is a noninvasive technique that can record cardiac vibrations by using new cutting-edge devices as accelerometers. Therefore, providing new and reliable data regarding advancements in the field of SCG, i.e., new devices and tools, is necessary to outperform the current understanding of the State-of-the-Art (SoTA). This paper reviews the SoTA on SCG and concentrates on three critical aspects of the SCG approach, i.e., on the acquisition, annotation, and its current applications. Moreover, this comprehensive overview also presents a detailed summary of recent advancements in SCG, such as the adoption of new techniques based on the artificial intelligence field, e.g., machine learning, deep learning, artificial neural networks, and fuzzy logic. Finally, a discussion on the open issues and future investigations regarding the topic is included.

With the growth in Internet and digital technology, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and Telemedicine have become buzzwords in healthcare. A large number of medical images and information is shared through a public network in these applications. This paper proposes a region-based hybrid Medical Image Watermarking (MIW) scheme to ensure the authenticity, authorization, integrity, and confidentiality of the medical images transmitted through a public network in IoMT. In the proposed scheme, medical image is segmented into Region of Interest (RoI) and Region of Non-Interest (RoNI). RoI tamper detection and recovery bits are embedded in RoI to ensure the integrity of the medical image. RoI is watermarked using adaptive Least Significant Bit (LSB) substitution with respect to the hiding capacity map for higher RoI imperceptibility and accuracy in tamper detection and recovery. Electronic Patient Record (EPR) is compressed using Huffman coding and encrypted using a pseudo-random key (secret key) to provide higher confidentiality and payload. Encrypted EPR, QR code of hospital logo, and RoI recovery bits are embedded in RoNI using Discrete Wavelet Transform-Singular Value Decomposition (DWT-SVD) hybrid transforms to achieve a robust watermark. The proposed scheme is tested under various geometric and non-geometric attacks such as filtering, compression, rotation, salt and pepper noise and shearing. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme has high imperceptibility, robustness, security, payload, tamper detection, and recovery accuracy under image processing attacks. Therefore, the proposed scheme can be used in the transmission of medical images and EPR in IoMT. Relevance of the proposed scheme is established by its superior performance in comparison to some of the popular existing schemes.