Background. Uterine contraction (UC) is the tightening and shortening of the uterine muscles which can indicate the progress of pregnancy towards delivery. Electrohysterogram (EHG), which reflects uterine electrical activities, has recently been studied for UC monitoring. In this paper, we aimed to evaluate different EHG segments for recognizing UCs using the convolutional neural network (CNN). Materials and Methods. In the open-access Icelandic 16-electrode EHG database (122 recordings from 45 pregnant women), 7136 UC and 7136 non-UC EHG segments with the duration of 60 s were manually extracted from 107 recordings of 40 pregnant women to develop a CNN model. A fivefold cross-validation was applied to evaluate the CNN based on sensitivity (SE), specificity (SP), and accuracy (ACC). Then, 1056 UC and 1056 non-UC EHG segments were extracted from the other 15 recordings of 5 pregnant women. Furthermore, the developed CNN model was applied to identify UCs using different EHG segments with the durations of 10 s, 20 s, and 30 s. Results. The CNN achieved the average SE, SP, and ACC of 0.82, 0.93, and 0.88 for a 60 s EHG segment. The EHG segments of 10 s, 20 s, and 30 s around the TOCO peak achieved higher SE and ACC than the other segments with the same duration. The values of SE from 20 s EHG segments around the TOCO peak were higher than those from 10 s to 30 s EHG segments on the same side of the TOCO peak. Conclusion. The proposed method could be used to determine the efficient EHG segments for recognizing UC with the CNN.

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Preliminary Study on the Efficient Electrohysterogram Segments for Recognizing Uterine Contractions with Convolutional Neural Networks.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/am/pii/S1746809421008284

Review on EHG signal analysis and its application in preterm diagnosis

Saliva has emerged as an efficient screening sample for early stage detection of oral cancer (OC) owing to non-invasiveness coupled with high sensitivity and specificity. Although spectroscopic characterization of saliva in oral potentially malignant disorders OPMDs) and OC is extensively studied, its potential as imaging biomarker is sparsely explored. Further, the literature on crystalline pattern of saliva for other diseases or different physiological conditions is mostly qualitative. This paper proposed multifractal based methodology to quantitatively study alteration of the salivary fern pattern in different OPMDs and OC in relation to normal counterpart. The fern pattern of dried saliva is captured by stereo-zoom microscope in reflective mode and an image dataset is developed. We resort to two dimensional multi-fractal detrended fluctuation analysis (2d MFDFA) to elucidate the complexity and heterogeneity of these micro-structured patterns. Existence of multifractal nature embedded in salivary fern has been validated for the first time. Long range spatial correlation is found to be the origin of multifractality. Variation in multi-scale self-similarity of irregular pattern in different study groups is demonstrated by four features extracted from MFDFA. Statistical analysis shows discriminating nature of these features for combinations of pairwise interclass classification. This study sheds light on acceptability of microscopic images of arborized saliva in fast and cost effective screening of different oral lesions.

Multifractal Texture Analysis of Salivary Fern Pattern for Oral Pre-Cancers and Cancer Assessment

Differentiation of early mild cognitive impairment in brainstem MR images using multifractal detrended moving average singularity spectral features

Objectives: The objectives of this paper are to examine the source of multifractality in uterine electromyography (EMG) signals and to study the progression of pregnancy in the term (gestation period > 37 weeks) conditions using multifractal detrending moving average (MFDMA) algorithm. Methods: The signals for the study, considered from an online database, are obtained from the surface of abdomen during the second (T1) and third trimester (T2). The existence of multifractality is tested using Hurst and scaling exponents. With the intention of identifying the origin of multifractality, the preprocessed signals are converted to shuffle and surrogate data. The original and the transformed signals are subjected to MFDMA to extract multifractal spectrum features, namely strength of multifractality, maximum, minimum, and peak singularity exponents. Results: The Hurst and scaling exponents extracted from the signals indicate that uterine EMG signals are multifractal in nature. Further analysis shows that the source of multifractality is mainly owing to the presence of long-range correlation, which is computed as 79.98% in T1 and 82.43% in T2 groups. Among the extracted features, the peak singularity exponent and strength of multifractality show statistical significance in identifying the progression of pregnancy. The corresponding coefficients of variation are found to be low, which show that these features have low intersubject variability. Conclusion: It appears that the multifractal analysis can help in investigating the progressive changes in uterine muscle contractions during pregnancy.

Punitha Namadurai

Papers

Multifractal Analysis of Uterine Electromyography Signals for the Assessment of Progression of Pregnancy in Term Conditions