Rheumatic Heart Disease Screening Based on Phonocardiogram

Machine learning and artificial intelligence within pediatric autoimmune diseases: applications, challenges, future perspective

INTRODUCTION

Autoimmune disorders affect 4.5% to 9.4% of children, significantly reducing their quality of life. The diagnosis and prognosis of autoimmune diseases are uncertain because of the variety of onset and development. Machine learning can identify clinically relevant patterns from vast amounts of data. Hence, its introduction has been beneficial in the diagnosis and management of patients.

AREAS COVERED

This narrative review was conducted through searching various electronic databases, including PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science. This study thoroughly explores the current knowledge and identifies the remaining gaps in the applications of machine learning specifically in the context of pediatric autoimmune and related diseases.

EXPERT OPINION

Machine learning algorithms have the potential to completely change how pediatric autoimmune disorders are identified, treated, and managed. Machine learning can assist physicians in making more precise and fast judgments, identifying new biomarkers and therapeutic targets, and personalizing treatment strategies for each patient by utilizing massive datasets and powerful analytics.

Heart sounds: Past, present, and future from a technological and clinical perspective - a systematic review

The high prevalence of cardiac diseases around the world has created a need for quick, easy and cost effective approaches to diagnose heart disease. The auscultation and interpretation of heart sounds using the stethoscope is relatively inexpensive, requires minimal to advanced training, and is widely available and easily carried by healthcare providers working in urban environments or medically underserved rural areas. Since René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec's simple, monoaural design, the capabilities of modern-day, commercially available stethoscopes and stethoscope systems have radically advanced with the integration of electronic hardware and software tools, however these systems are largely confined to the metropolitan medical centers. The purpose of this paper is to review the history of stethoscopes, compare commercially available stethoscope products and analytical software, and discuss future directions. Our review includes a description of heart sounds and how modern software enables the measurement and analysis of time intervals, teaching auscultation, remote cardiac examination (telemedicine) and, more recently, spectrographic evaluation and electronic storage. The basic methodologies behind modern software algorithms and techniques for heart sound preprocessing, segmentation and classification are described to provide awareness.

Characterization of rheumatic heart disease from electrocardiogram recordings

Objective. Rheumatic Heart Disease (RHD) is one of the highly prevalent heart diseases in developing countries that can affect the pericardium, myocardium, or endocardium. Rheumatic endocarditis is a common RHD variant that gradually deteriorates the normal function of the heart valves. RHD can be diagnosed using standard echocardiography or listened to as a heart murmur using a stethoscope. The electrocardiogram (ECG), on the other hand, is critical in the study and identification of heart rhythms and abnormalities. The effectiveness of ECG to identify distinguishing signs of rheumatic heart problems, however, has not been adequately examined. This study addressed the possible use of ECG recordings for the characterization of problems of the heart in RHD patients.Approach. To this end, an extensive ECG dataset was collected from patients suffering from RHD (PwRHD), and healthy control subjects (HC). Bandpass filtering was used at the preprocessing stage. Each data was then standardized by removing its mean and dividing by its standard deviation. Delineation of the onsets and offsets of waves was performed using KIT-IBT open ECG MATLAB toolbox. PR interval, QRS duration, RR intervals, QT intervals, and QTc intervals were computed for each heartbeat. The median values of the temporal parameters were used to eliminate possible outliers due to missed ECG waves. The data were clustered in different age groups and sex. Another categorization was done based on the time duration since the first RHD diagnosis.Main results. In 47.2% of the cases, a PR elongation was observed, and in 26.4% of the cases, the QRS duration was elongated. QTc was elongated in 44.3% of the cases. It was also observed that 62.2% of the cases had bradycardia.Significance. The end product of this research can lead to new medical devices and services that can screen RHD based on ECG which could somehow assist in the detection and diagnosis of the disease in low-resource settings and alleviate the burden of the disease.

Orthogonality-Constrained CNMF-Based Noise Reduction with Reduced Degradation of Biological Sound

The number of deaths due to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases is increasing annually. Cardiovascular diseases with high mortality rates, such as strokes, are frequently caused by atrial fibrillation without subjective symptoms. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is another condition in which early detection is difficult owing to the slow progression of the disease. Hence, a device that enables the early diagnosis of both diseases is necessary. In our previous study, a sensor for monitoring biological sounds such as vascular and respiratory sounds was developed and a noise reduction method based on semi-supervised convolutive non-negative matrix factorization (SCNMF) was proposed for the noisy environments of users. However, SCNMF attenuated part of the biological sound in addition to the noise. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel noise reduction method that achieves less distortion by imposing orthogonality constraints on the SCNMF. The effectiveness of the proposed method was verified experimentally using the biological sounds of 21 subjects. The experimental results showed an average improvement of 1.4 dB in the signal-to-noise ratio and 2.1 dB in the signal-to-distortion ratio over the conventional method. These results demonstrate the capability of the proposed approach to measure biological sounds even in noisy environments.