Segmentation of Glioma Tumors in Brain Using Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Detection of brain tumor using a segmentation based approach is critical in cases, where survival of a subject depends on an accurate and timely clinical diagnosis. Gliomas are the most commonly found tumors having irregular shape and ambiguous boundaries, making them one of the hardest tumors to detect. The automation of brain tumor segmentation remains a challenging problem mainly due to significant variations in its structure. An automated brain tumor segmentation algorithm using deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) is presented in this paper. A patch based approach along with an inception module is used for training the deep network by extracting two co-centric patches of different sizes from the input images. Recent developments in deep neural networks such as drop-out, batch normalization, non-linear activation and inception module are used to build a new ILinear nexus architecture. The module overcomes the over-fitting problem arising due to scarcity of data using drop-out regularizer. Images are normalized and bias field corrected in the pre-processing step and then extracted patches are passed through a DCNN, which assigns an output label to the central pixel of each patch. Morphological operators are used for post-processing to remove small false positives around the edges. A two-phase weighted training method is introduced and evaluated using BRATS 2013 and BRATS 2015 datasets, where it improves the performance parameters of state-of-the-art techniques under similar settings.Comment: Submitted to Neurocomputin

Classification of Arrhythmia by Using Deep Learning with 2-D ECG Spectral Image Representation

The electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the most extensively employed signals used in the diagnosis and prediction of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). The ECG signals can capture the heart's rhythmic irregularities, commonly known as arrhythmias. A careful study of ECG signals is crucial for precise diagnoses of patients' acute and chronic heart conditions. In this study, we propose a two-dimensional (2-D) convolutional neural network (CNN) model for the classification of ECG signals into eight classes; namely, normal beat, premature ventricular contraction beat, paced beat, right bundle branch block beat, left bundle branch block beat, atrial premature contraction beat, ventricular flutter wave beat, and ventricular escape beat. The one-dimensional ECG time series signals are transformed into 2-D spectrograms through short-time Fourier transform. The 2-D CNN model consisting of four convolutional layers and four pooling layers is designed for extracting robust features from the input spectrograms. Our proposed methodology is evaluated on a publicly available MIT-BIH arrhythmia dataset. We achieved a state-of-the-art average classification accuracy of 99.11\%, which is better than those of recently reported results in classifying similar types of arrhythmias. The performance is significant in other indices as well, including sensitivity and specificity, which indicates the success of the proposed method.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, accepted for future publication in Remote Sensing MDPI Journa

Energy harvesting and wireless transfer in sensor network applications: Concepts and experiences

Advances in micro-electronics and miniaturized mechanical systems are redefining the scope and extent of the energy constraints found in battery-operated wireless sensor networks (WSNs). On one hand, ambient energy harvesting may prolong the systems lifetime or possibly enable perpetual operation. On the other hand, wireless energy transfer allows systems to decouple the energy sources from the sensing locations, enabling deployments previously unfeasible. As a result of applying these technologies to WSNs, the assumption of a finite energy budget is replaced with that of potentially infinite, yet intermittent, energy supply, profoundly impacting the design, implementation, and operation of WSNs. This article discusses these aspects by surveying paradigmatic examples of existing solutions in both fields and by reporting on real-world experiences found in the literature. The discussion is instrumental in providing a foundation for selecting the most appropriate energy harvesting or wireless transfer technology based on the application at hand. We conclude by outlining research directions originating from the fundamental change of perspective that energy harvesting and wireless transfer bring about

Upper Limb Movement Execution Classification using Electroencephalography for Brain Computer Interface

An accurate classification of upper limb movements using electroencephalography (EEG) signals is gaining significant importance in recent years due to the prevalence of brain-computer interfaces. The upper limbs in the human body are crucial since different skeletal segments combine to make a range of motion that helps us in our trivial daily tasks. Decoding EEG-based upper limb movements can be of great help to people with spinal cord injury (SCI) or other neuro-muscular diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), primary lateral sclerosis, and periodic paralysis. This can manifest in a loss of sensory and motor function, which could make a person reliant on others to provide care in day-to-day activities. We can detect and classify upper limb movement activities, whether they be executed or imagined using an EEG-based brain-computer interface (BCI). Toward this goal, we focus our attention on decoding movement execution (ME) of the upper limb in this study. For this purpose, we utilize a publicly available EEG dataset that contains EEG signal recordings from fifteen subjects acquired using a 61-channel EEG device. We propose a method to classify four ME classes for different subjects using spectrograms of the EEG data through pre-trained deep learning (DL) models. Our proposed method of using EEG spectrograms for the classification of ME has shown significant results, where the highest average classification accuracy (for four ME classes) obtained is 87.36%, with one subject achieving the best classification accuracy of 97.03%

Strategy-Performance Relationship Through Organizational Resilience: The Analysis of Tourism SMEs

This paper aims to analyze the strategy-performance relationship through the mediation of organization resilience in tourism SMEs. Primary data was collected from 760 managers of tourism SMEs in the top five tourism destinations in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province of Pakistan using multistage cluster sampling through researcher-administrated questionnaires. Miles and Snow's classification of SMEs' strategic orientations as Prospector, Analyzer, Defender and Reactors was used. AMOS-SEM was applied to analyze the strategy-performance relationship and mediation of organizational resilience. The findings showed that strategy has a significant impact on organizational resilience and organizational performance. Organizational resilience mediates the strategy-performance relationship. Prospectors displayed the highest performance, followed by analyzers and defenders, while the performance of reactors was the lowest. This was cross-sectional research conducted in tourism SMEs in the Pakistani context. The sector is time-specific; therefore, a longitudinal study can be undertaken in national and international contexts. The government’s support in developing organizational resilience is rudimentary in the tourism sector due to its high vulnerability to environmental jolts. This empirical research contributed to the least-researched sector of tourism SMEs in Pakistan operating in distinct segments of tourism SMEs