Narrow Results

The aim of this study was to develop methods for detecting the nonstationary periodic characteristics of neonatal electroencephalographic (EEG) seizures by adapting estimates of the correlation both in the time (spike correlation; SC) and time–frequency domain (time–frequency correlation; TFC). These measures were incorporated into a seizure detection algorithm (SDA) based on a support vector machine to detect periods of seizure and nonseizure. The performance of these nonstationary correlation measures was evaluated using EEG recordings from 79 term neonates annotated by three human experts. The proposed measures were highly discriminative for seizure detection (median ${\mathrm{\text{AUC}}}_{\mathrm{\text{SC}}}$: 0.933 IQR: 0.821–0.975, median ${\mathrm{\text{AUC}}}_{\mathrm{\text{TFC}}}$: 0.883 IQR: 0.707–0.931). The resultant SDA applied to multi-channel recordings had a median AUC of 0.988 (IQR: 0.931–0.998) when compared to consensus annotations, outperformed two state-of-the-art SDAs $(p<0.001)$ and was noninferior to the human expert for 73/79 of neonates.

Diabetic patients might present peripheral microcirculation impairment and might benefit from physical training. Thirty-nine diabetic patients underwent the monitoring of the tibialis anterior muscle oxygenation during a series of voluntary ankle flexo-extensions by near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). NIRS signals were acquired before and after training protocols. Sixteen control subjects were tested with the same protocol. Time-frequency distributions of the Cohen's class were used to process the NIRS signals relative to the concentration changes of oxygenated and reduced hemoglobin. A total of 24 variables were measured for each subject and the most discriminative were selected by using four feature selection algorithms: QuickReduct, Genetic Rough-Set Attribute Reduction, Ant Rough-Set Attribute Reduction, and traditional ANOVA. Artificial neural networks were used to validate the discriminative power of the selected features. Results showed that different algorithms extracted different sets of variables, but all the combinations were discriminative. The best classification accuracy was about 70%. The oxygenation variables were selected when comparing controls to diabetic patients or diabetic patients before and after training. This preliminary study showed the importance of feature selection techniques in NIRS assessment of diabetic peripheral vascular impairment.

In this work, an improvement of the Complex Wavelet Additive Synthesis (CWAS) algorithm is presented. This algorithm is based on a discrete version of the Complex Continuous Wavelet Transform (CCWT) which analyzes the input signal in a frame-to-frame approach and under variable frequency resolution per octave. After summarizing several Time-Frequency Distributions (TFD), concretely the standard Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT), the Pseudo Wigner–Ville Distribution (PWVD), reassignment and complex wavelets, a comparative study of the accuracy in the instantaneous frequency (IF) estimation is shown. The comparative study includes three different signal processing tools (based on the summarized TFD): the Time-Frequency Toolbox (TFTB) of François Auger, the High Resolution Spectrographic Routines (HRSR) of Sean Fulop and the proposed CWAS algorithm. A set of eight synthetic signals have been analyzed using six different methods: the regular STFT spectrogram, the PWVD, their corresponding reassigned versions, the Nelson crossed spectrum method and finally the Complex Continuous Wavelet Transform (CCWT). Finally, two- and three-dimensional Time-Frequency representations of the IF provided by the CWAS algorithm are presented.