Narrow Results

Medical image classification is currently a challenging task that can be used to aid the diagnosis of different brain diseases. Thus, exploratory and discriminative analysis techniques aiming to obtain representative features from the images play a decisive role in the design of effective Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems, which is especially important in the early diagnosis of dementia. In this work, we present a technique that allows using specific time series analysis techniques with 3D images. This is achieved by sampling the image using a fractal-based method which preserves the spatial relationship among voxels. In addition, a method called Empirical functional PCA (EfPCA) is presented, which combines Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) with functional PCA to express an image in the space spanned by a basis of empirical functions, instead of using components computed by a predefined basis as in Fourier or Wavelet analysis. The devised technique has been used to classify images from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) and the Parkinson Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI), achieving accuracies up to 93% and 92% differential diagnosis tasks (AD versus controls and PD versus Controls, respectively). The results obtained validate the method, proving that the information retrieved by our methodology is significantly linked to the diseases.

Analysis of heart sound is of great importance to the diagnosis of heart diseases. Most of the feature extraction methods about heart sound have focused on linear time-variant or time-invariant models. While heart sound is a kind of highly nonstationary and nonlinear vibration signal, traditional methods cannot fully reveal its essential properties. In this paper, a novel feature extraction approach is proposed for heart sound classification and recognition. The ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) method is used to decompose the heart sound into a finite number of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), and the correlation dimensions of the main IMF components (IMF1~IMF4) are calculated as feature set. Then the classical Binary Tree Support Vector Machine (BT-SVM) classifier is employed to classify the heart sounds which include the normal heart sounds (NHSs) and three kinds of abnormal signals namely mitral stenosis (MT), ventricular septal defect (VSD) and aortic stenosis (AS). Finally, the performance of the new feature set is compared with the correlation dimensions of original signals and the main IMF components obtained by the EMD method. The results showed that, for NHSs, the feature set proposed in this paper performed the best with recognition rate of 98.67%. For the abnormal signals, the best recognition rate of 91.67% was obtained. Therefore, the proposed feature set is more superior to two comparative feature sets, which has potential application in the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases.