Arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC) is an inherited heart muscle disease that appears between the second and forth decade of a patient's life, being responsible for 20% of sudden cardiac deaths before the age of 35. The effective and punctual diagnosis of this disease based on electrocardiograms (ECGs) could have a vital role in reducing premature cardiovascular mortality. In our analysis, we first outline the digitalization process of paperbased ECG signals enhanced by a spatial filter aiming to eliminate dark regions in the dataset's images that do not correspond to ECG waveform, producing undesirable noise. Next, we propose the utilization of a low-complexity convolutional neural network for the detection of an arrhythmogenic heart disease, that has not been studied through the usage of deep learning methodology to date, achieving high classification accuracy, namely 99.98% training and 98.6% testing accuracy, on a disease the major identification criterion of which are infinitesimal millivolt variations in the ECG's morphology, in contrast with other arrhythmogenic abnormalities. Finally, by performing spectral analysis we investigate significant differentiations in the field of frequencies between normal ECGs and ECGs corresponding to patients suffering from ARVC. In 16 out of the 18 frequencies where we encounter statistically significant differentiations, the normal ECGs are characterized by greater normalized amplitudes compared to the abnormal ones. The overall research carried out in this article highlights the importance of integrating mathematical methods into the examination and effective diagnosis of various diseases, aiming to a substantial contribution to their successful treatment.
Brain tumor detection or brain tumor classification is one of the most challenging problems in modern medicine, where patients suffering from benign or malignant brain tumors are usually characterized by low life expectancy making the necessity of a punctual and accurate diagnosis mandatory. However, even today, this kind of diagnosis is based on manual classification of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), culminating in inaccurate conclusions especially when they derive from inexperienced doctors. Hence, trusted, automatic classification schemes are essential for the reduction of humans’ death rate due to this major chronic disease. In this article, we propose an automatic classification tool, using a computationally economic convolutional neural network (CNN), for the purposes of a binary problem concerning MRI images depicting the existence or the absence of brain tumors. The proposed model is based on a dataset containing real MRI images of both classes with nearly perfect validation-testing accuracy and low computational complexity, resulting a very fast and reliable training-validation process. During our analysis we compare the diagnostic capacity of three alternative loss functions, validating the appropriateness of cross entropy function, while underlining the capability of an alternative loss function named Jensen-Shannon divergence since our model accomplished nearly excellent testing accuracy, as with cross-entropy. The multiple validation tests applied, enhancing the robustness of the produced results, render this low-complexity CNN structure as an ideal and trustworthy medical aid for the classification of small datasets.
The prevalence of COVID-19 has been the most serious health challenge of the 21th century to date, concerning national health systems on a daily basis, since December 2019 when it appeared in Wuhan City. Prediction of pandemic spread plays an important role in effectively reducing this highly contagious disease. Nevertheless, most of the proposed mathematical methodologies, which aim to describe the dynamics of the pandemic, rely on deterministic models that are not able to reflect the true nature of the spread of COVID. In this paper, we propose a SEIHCRDV model – an extension of the classic SIR compartmental model – which also takes into consideration the populations of exposed, hospitalized, admitted in intensive care units (ICU), deceased and vaccinated cases, in combination with an unscented Kalman filter (UKF), providing a dynamic estimation of the time dependent parameters of the system. Apparently, this new consideration could be useful for examining also other pandemics. We examine the reliability of our model over a long period of 265 days, where we observe two major waves of infection, starting in January 2021 which signified the start of vaccinations in Europe, providing quite encouraging predictive performance. Finally, special emphasis is given to proving the non-negativity of SEIHCRDV model, to achieve a representative basic reproductive number R0 and to investigating the existence and stability of disease equilibriums in accordance with the formula produced to estimate R0.
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