IEEE transactions on bio-medical engineering
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IEEE Trans Biomed Eng · Apr 2002
Cascaded differential and wavelet compression of chromosome images.
This paper proposes a new method for chromosome image compression based on an important characteristic of these images: the regions of interest (ROIs) to cytogeneticists for evaluation and diagnosis are well determined and segmented. Such information is utilized to advantage in our compression algorithm, which combines lossless compression of chromosome ROIs with lossy-to-lossless coding of the remaining image parts. ⋯ The well-known set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) (Said and Perlman, 1996) algorithm is modified to generate separate embedded bit streams for both chromosome ROIs and the rest of the image that allow continuous lossy-to-lossless compression of both (although lossless compression of the former is commonly used in practice). Experiments on two sets of sample chromosome spread and karyotype images indicate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms current compression techniques used in commercial karyotyping systems and JPEG-2000 compression, which does not provide the desirable support for lossless compression of arbitrary ROIs.
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IEEE Trans Biomed Eng · Mar 2002
Compression depth estimation for CPR quality assessment using DSP on accelerometer signals.
Chest compression is a vital part of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). This paper demonstrates how the compression depth can be estimated using the principles of inertia navigation. The proposed method uses accelerometer sensors, one placed on the patient's chest, the other beside the patient. ⋯ Instability problems due to integration are combated using a set of boundary conditions. The proposed algorithm is tested on a mannequin in harsh environments, where the patient is exposed to external forces as in a boat or car, as well as improper sensor/patient alignment. The overall performance is an estimation depth error of 4.3 mm in these environments, which is reduced to 1.6 mm in a regular, flat-floor controlled environment.
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IEEE Trans Biomed Eng · Mar 2002
A quality-on-demand algorithm for wavelet-based compression of electrocardiogram signals.
For the compression of medical signals such as electrocardiogram (ECG), excellent reconstruction quality of a highly compressed signal can be obtained by using a wavelet-based approach. The most widely used objective quality criterion for the compressed ECG is called the percent of root-mean-square difference (PRD). In this paper, given a user-specified PRD, an algorithm is proposed to meet the PRD demand by searching for an appropriate bit rate in an automatic, smooth, and fast manner for the wavelet-based compression. ⋯ A solution derived from root-finding methods in numerical analysis is proposed. The proposed solution is incorporated in a well-known wavelet-based coding strategy called set partitioning in hierarchical trees. ECG signals taken from the MIT/BIH database are tested, and excellent results in terms of convergence speed, quality variation, and coding performance are obtained.
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A new approach for quantifying the relationship between brain activity patterns and depth of anesthesia (DOA) is presented by analyzing the spatio-temporal patterns in the electroencephalogram (EEG) using Lempel-Ziv complexity analysis. Twenty-seven patients undergoing vascular surgery were studied under general anesthesia with sevoflurane, isoflurane, propofol, or desflurane. The EEG was recorded continuously during the procedure and patients' anesthesia states were assessed according to the responsiveness component of the observer's assessment of alertness/sedation (OAA/S) score. ⋯ Complexity of the EEG was quantitatively estimated by the measure C(n), whose performance in discriminating awake and asleep states was analyzed by statistics for different anesthetic techniques and different patient populations. Compared with other measures, such as approximate entropy, spectral entropy, and median frequency, C(n) not only demonstrates better performance (93% accuracy) across all of the patients, but also is an easier algorithm to implement for real-time use. The study shows that C(n) is a very useful and promising EEG-derived parameter for characterizing the (DOA) under clinical situations.
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IEEE Trans Biomed Eng · Nov 2001
Do existing measures of Poincaré plot geometry reflect nonlinear features of heart rate variability?
Heart rate variability (HRV) is concerned with the analysis of the intervals between heartbeats. An emerging analysis technique is the Poincaré plot, which takes a sequence of intervals and plots each interval against the following interval. The geometry of this plot has been shown to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy subjects in clinical settings. ⋯ We investigate each of these methods in detail and show that they are all measuring linear aspects of the intervals which existing HRV indexes already specify. The fact that these methods appear insensitive to the nonlinear characteristics of the intervals is an important finding because the Poincaré plot is primarily a nonlinear technique. Therefore, further work is needed to determine if better methods of characterizing Poincaré plot geometry can be found.