Biomedical applications of photoacoustics, in particular photoacoustic tomography, require efficient models of photoacoustic propagation that can incorporate realistic properties of soft tissue, such as acoustic inhomogeneities both for purposes of simulation and for use in model-based image reconstruction methods. k-space methods are well suited to modeling high-frequency acoustics applications as they require fewer mesh points per wavelength than conventional finite element and finite difference models, and larger time steps can be taken without a loss of stability or accuracy. They are also straightforward to encode numerically, making them appealing as a general tool. The rationale behind k-space methods and the k-space approach to the numerical modeling of photoacoustic waves in fluids are covered in this paper. Three existing k-space models are applied to photoacoustics and demonstrated with examples: an exact model for homogeneous media, a second-order model that can take into account heterogeneous media, and a first-order model that can incorporate absorbing boundary conditions.

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Complexity measures have been enormously used in schizophrenia patients to estimate brain dynamics. However, the conflicting results in terms of both increased and reduced complexity values have been reported in these studies depending on the patients' clinical status or symptom severity or medication and age status. The objective of this study is to investigate the nonlinear brain dynamics of chronic and medicated schizophrenia patients using distinct complexity estimators. EEG data were collected from 22 relaxed eyes-closed patients and age-matched healthy controls. A single-trial EEG series of 2 min was partitioned into identical epochs of 20 s intervals. The EEG complexity of participants were investigated and compared using approximate entropy (ApEn), Shannon entropy (ShEn), Kolmogorov complexity (KC) and Lempel-Ziv complexity (LZC). Lower complexity values were obtained in schizophrenia patients. The most significant complexity differences between patients and controls were obtained in especially left frontal (F3) and parietal (P3) regions of the brain when all complexity measures were applied individually. Significantly, we found that KC was more sensitive for detecting EEG complexity of patients than other estimators in all investigated brain regions. Moreover, significant inter-hemispheric complexity differences were found in the frontal and parietal areas of schizophrenics' brain. Our findings demonstrate that the utilizing of sensitive complexity estimators to analyze brain dynamics of patients might be a useful discriminative tool for diagnostic purposes. Therefore, we expect that nonlinear analysis will give us deeper understanding of schizophrenics' brain.

In this study, normal EEG series recorded from healthy volunteers and epileptic EEG series recorded from patients within and without seizure are classified by using Multilayer Neural Network (MLNN) architectures with respect to several time domain entropy measures such as Shannon Entropy (ShanEn), Log Energy Entropy (LogEn), and Sample Entropy (Sampen). In tests, the MLNN is performed with several numbers of neurons for both one hidden layer and two hidden layers. The results show that segments in seizure have significantly lower entropy values than normal EEG series. This result indicates an important increase of EEG regularity in epilepsy patients. The LogEn approach, which has not been experienced in EEG classification yet, provides the most reliable features into the EEG classification with very low absolute error as 0.01. In particular, the MLNN can be proposed to distinguish the seizure activity from the seizure-free epileptic series where the LogEn values are considered as signal features that characterize the degree of EEG complexity. The highest classification accuracy is obtained for one hidden layer architecture.

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