The prevention, evaluation, and treatment of hypertension have attracted increasing attention in recent years. As photoplethysmography (PPG) technology has been widely applied to wearable sensors, the noninvasive estimation of blood pressure (BP) using the PPG method has received considerable interest. In this paper, a method for estimating systolic and diastolic BP based only on a PPG signal is developed. The multitaper method (MTM) is used for feature extraction, and an artificial neural network (ANN) is used for estimation. Compared with previous approaches, the proposed method obtains better accuracy; the mean absolute error is 4.02 ± 2.79 mmHg for systolic BP and 2.27 ± 1.82 mmHg for diastolic BP.

Bariatric surgery is an effective method to rapidly induce weight loss in severely obese people, however its impact on brain functional connectivity after longer periods of follow-up is yet to be assessed. We investigated changes in connectivity in 16 severely obese women one month before, one month after and one year after Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery (RYGB). 12 lean controls were also enrolled. Resting-state fMRI was acquired for all participants following an overnight fast and after a 260 kcal load. Connectivity between regions involved in food-related saliency attribution and reward-driven eating behavior was stronger in presurgery patients compared to controls, but progressively weakened after follow-up. At one year, changes in networks related to cognitive control over eating and bodily perception also occurred. Connectivity between regions involved in emotional control and social cognition had a temporary reduction early after treatment but had increased again after one year of follow-up. Furthermore, we could predict the BMI loss by presurgery connectivity in areas linked to emotional control and social interaction. RYGBP seems to reshape brain functional connectivity, early affecting cognitive control over eating, and these changes could be an important part of the therapeutic effect of bariatric surgery.

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Background:In response to food cues, obese vs normal-weight individuals show greater activation in brain regions involved in the regulation of food intake under both fasted and sated conditions. Putative effects of obesity on task-independent low-frequency blood-oxygenation-level-dependent signals—that is, resting-state brain activity—in the context of food intake are, however, less well studied.Objective:To compare eyes closed, whole-brain low-frequency BOLD signals between severely obese and normal-weight females, as assessed by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).Methods:Fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations were measured in the morning following an overnight fast in 17 obese (age: 39±11 years, body mass index (BMI): 42.3±4.8 kg m−2) and 12 normal-weight females (age: 36±12 years, BMI: 22.7±1.8 kg m−2), both before and 30 min after consumption of a standardized meal (~260 kcal).Results:Compared with normal-weight controls, obese females had increased low-frequency activity in clusters located in the putamen, claustrum and insula (P<0.05). This group difference was not altered by food intake. Self-reported hunger dropped and plasma glucose concentrations increased after food intake (P<0.05); however, these changes did not differ between the BMI groups.Conclusion:Reward-related brain regions are more active under resting-state conditions in obese than in normal-weight females. This difference was independent of food intake under the experimental settings applied in the current study. Future studies involving males and females, as well as utilizing repeated post-prandial resting-state fMRI scans and various types of meals are needed to further investigate how food intake alters resting-state brain activity in obese humans.

Heart rate variability (HRV) is an effective predictor of congestive heart failure (CHF). However, important challenges exist regarding the effective temporal feature extraction and efficient classification using high-dimensional HRV representations. To solve these challenges, an ensemble method for CHF detection using short-term HRV data and deep neural networks was proposed. In this paper, five opensource databases, the BIDMC CHF database (BIDMC-CHF), CHF RR interval database (CHF-RR), MIT-BIH normal sinus rhythm (NSR) database, fantasia database (FD), and NSR RR interval database (NSR-RR), were used. Additionally, three RR segment length types (N = 500, 1000, and 2000) were used to evaluate the proposed method. First, we extracted the expert features of RR intervals (RRIs) and then built a long short-term memory-convolutional neural network-based network to extract deep-learning (DL) features automatically. Finally, an ensemble classifier was used for CHF detection using the above features. With blindfold validation (three CHF subjects and three normal subjects), the proposed method achieved 99.85%, 99.41%, and 99.17% accuracy on N = 500, 1000, and 2000 length RRIs, respectively, using the BIDMC-CHF, NSR, and FD databases. With blindfold validation (six CHF subjects and six normal subjects), the proposed method achieved 83.84%, 87.54%, and 85.71% accuracy on N = 500, 1000, and 2000 length RRIs, respectively, using the NSR-RR and CHF-RR ndatabases. Based on feature ranking, the significant effectiveness provided by the DL features has been proven. The results have shown that the deep ensemble method can achieve reliable CHF detection using short-term heart rate signals and enable CHF detection through intelligent hardware. INDEX TERMS Electrocardiography, boosting, artificial intelligence.

Past studies utilizing resting-state functional MRI (rsfMRI), have shown that obese humans exhibit altered activity in brain areas related to reward compared to normal-weight controls. However, to what extent bariatric surgery-induced weight loss alters resting-state brain activity in obese humans is less well-studied. Thus, we measured the fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations from eyes-closed, rsfMRI in obese females (n = 11, mean age = 42 years, mean BMI = 41 kg/m 2 ) in both a pre-and postprandial state at two time points: four weeks before, and four weeks after bariatric surgery. Several brain areas showed altered resting-state activity following bariatric surgery, including the putamen, insula, cingulate, thalamus and frontal regions. Activity augmented by surgery was also dependent on prandial state. For example, in the fasted state, activity in the middle frontal and pre-and postcentral gyri was found to be decreased after surgery. In the sated state, activity within the insula was increased before, but not after surgery. Collectively, our results suggest that resting-state neural functions are rapidly affected following bariatric surgery and the associated weight loss and change in diet.

The proposed algorithm targets a large number of raw, short single ECG data rather than a small number of carefully selected, often clean ECG records, which have been studied in most of the previous literature. It breaks through the limitation in applicability and provides reliable AF detection from a short single-lead ECG.

The steady-state visually evoked potential (SSVEP) has been widely used in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Many studies have proved that the Multivariate synchronization index (MSI) is an efficient method for recognizing the frequency components in SSVEP-based BCIs. Despite its success, the recognition accuracy has not been satisfactory because the simplified pre-constructed sine-cosine waves lack abundant features from the real electroencephalogram (EEG) data. Recent advances in addressing this issue have achieved a significant improvement in recognition accuracy by using individual calibration data. In this study, a new extension based on inter-and intra-subject template signals is introduced to improve the performance of the standard MSI method. Through template transfer, inter-subject similarity and variability are employed to enhance the robustness of SSVEP recognition. Additionally, most existed methods for SSVEP recognition utilize a fixed time window (TW) to perform frequency domain analysis, which limits the information transfer rate (ITR) of BCIs. For addressing this problem, a novel adaptive threshold strategy is integrated into the extension of MSI, which uses a dynamic window to extract the temporal features of SSVEPs and recognizes the stimulus frequency based on a pre-set threshold. The pre-set threshold contributes to obtaining an appropriate and shorter signal length for frequency recognition and filtering ignored-invalid trials. The proposed method is evaluated on a 12-class SSVEP dataset recorded from 10 subjects, and the result shows that this achieves higher recognition accuracy and information transfer rate when compared with the CCA, MSI, Multi-set CCA, and Individual Template-based CCA. This paper demonstrates that the proposed method is a promising approach for developing high-speed BCIs.