Medical imaging techniques have widely been in use in the diagnosis and detection of breast cancer. The drawback of applying these techniques is the large time consumption in the manual diagnosis of each image pattern by a professional radiologist. Automated classifiers could substantially upgrade the diagnosis process, in terms of both accuracy and time requirement by distinguishing benign and malignant patterns automatically. Neural network (NN) plays an important role in this respect, especially in the application of breast cancer detection. Despite the large number of publications that describe the utilization of NN in various medical techniques, only a few reviews are available that guide the development of these algorithms to enhance the detection techniques with respect to specificity and sensitivity. The purpose of this review is to analyze the contents of recently published literature with special attention to techniques and states of the art of NN in medical imaging. We discuss the usage of NN in four different medical imaging applications to show that NN is not restricted to few areas of medicine. Types of NN used, along with the various types of feeding data, have been reviewed. We also address hybrid NN adaptation in breast cancer detection.

Manual lifting is one of the common practices used in the industries to transport or move objects to a desired place. Nowadays, even though mechanized equipment is widely available, manual lifting is still considered as an essential way to perform material handling task. Improper lifting strategies may contribute to musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), where overexertion contributes as the highest factor. To overcome this problem, electromyography (EMG) signal is used to monitor the workers’ muscle condition and to find maximum lifting load, lifting height and number of repetitions that the workers are able to handle before experiencing fatigue to avoid overexertion. Past researchers have introduced several EMG processing techniques and different EMG features that represent fatigue indices in time, frequency, and time-frequency domain. The impact of EMG processing based measures in fatigue assessment during manual lifting are reviewed in this paper. It is believed that this paper will greatly benefit researchers who need a bird’s eye view of the biosignal processing which are currently available, thus determining the best possible techniques for lifting applications.

Electromyography (EMG) is known as complex bioelectricity signals that representing the contraction of the muscle in humanbody. The EMG signal offers useful information that can help to understand the human movement. Many techniques have been proposed by various researchers such as fast Fourier transforms (FFT). However, the technique only gives temporal information of the signal and does not suitable for EMG that consists of magnitude and frequency variation. In this paper, the analysis of EMG signal is presented using time-frequency distribution (TFD) which is spectrogram with different window size. Since the spectrogram represent the the EMG signal in time-frequency representation (TFR), it is very appropriate to analyze the signal. The EMG signals from Biceps muscle of two subjects are collected for body position of 0° and 90°. From the TFR, parameters of the signal such as instantaneous fundamental root mean square (RMS) voltage (Vrms) are estimated. To identify the suitable windows size, spectrogram with size window of 64, 256, 512 and 1024 is used to analyze the signal and the performance of the TFR are evaluated. The results show that spectrogram with window size of 512 gives optimal TFR of the EMG signals and suitable to characterize the signal.

Determining Best Window Size for an Improved Gabor Transform in EMG Signal Analysis

Developing a classification system that can predict the onset of neurodegenerative diseases or gait-related disorders in elders is vital for preventing incidents like falls. Early detection allows reduction in symptoms and treatment cost for the elderly. In this study, step duration data from five healthy adolescents with age range of 23 – 29 years old and five healthy elderly individuals with age range of 71 – 77 years old were sourced from PhysioNet. To ensure proper training of the deep learning models, synthetic data was generated from the original dataset using a noise jittering technique with random noise of a range between -0.01 and 0.01 added to the original data. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and 1D Convolutional Neural Network (1D-CNN) are used for training the data since the data is available in the form time series data. LSTM and GRU are advanced forms of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) while 1D – CNN can capture temporal dependencies in sequential data. 1D – CNN has the advantages over GRU and LSTM of being more robust to noise and can capture complex patterns behind the data. These methods will be compared in terms of processing time and accuracy. Results show that 1D – CNN outperforms both LSTM and GRU with accuracy of 1.000 in less than 60 seconds. The novelty and contribution of this research shows that healthy old people and healthy young people can be classified with deep learning. Further direction of the research can explore the deep learning in classification of Parkinson’s disease.