Diabetic macular edema (DME) is one of the most common eye complication caused by diabetes mellitus, resulting in partial or total loss of vision. Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) volumes have been widely used to diagnose different eye diseases, thanks to their sensitivity to represent small amounts of fluid, thickness between layers and swelling. However, the lack of tools for automatic image analysis for supporting disease diagnosis is still a problem. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown outstanding performance when applied to several medical images analysis tasks. This paper presents a model, OCT-NET, based on a CNN for the automatic classification of OCT volumes. The model was evaluated on a dataset of OCT volumes for DME diagnosis using a leave-one-out cross-validation strategy obtaining an accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of 93.75%.

Physical exercise contributes to the success of rehabilitation programs and rehabilitation processes assisted through social robots. However, the amount and intensity of exercise needed to obtain positive results are unknown. Several considerations must be kept in mind for its implementation in rehabilitation, as monitoring of patients’ intensity, which is essential to avoid extreme fatigue conditions, may cause physical and physiological complications. The use of machine learning models has been implemented in fatigue management, but is limited in practice due to the lack of understanding of how an individual’s performance deteriorates with fatigue; this can vary based on physical exercise, environment, and the individual’s characteristics. As a first step, this paper lays the foundation for a data analytic approach to managing fatigue in walking tasks. The proposed framework establishes the criteria for a feature and machine learning algorithm selection for fatigue management, classifying four fatigue diagnoses states. Based on the proposed framework and the classifier implemented, the random forest model presented the best performance with an average accuracy of ≥98% and F-score of ≥93%. This model was comprised of ≤16 features. In addition, the prediction performance was analyzed by limiting the sensors used from four IMUs to two or even one IMU with an overall performance of ≥88%.

Accurate detection of diabetic macular edema (DME) is an important task in optical coherence tomography (OCT) images of the eye. A relatively simple and practical approach is proposed in this paper. A pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) is fine tuned for a classification of DME versus normal cases. The fine-tuned Inception-Resnet-v2 CNN model can effectively identify pathologies in comparison to classical learning. Experiments were carried out on the publicly available data set of the Singapore Eye Research Institute (SERI). The developed model was also compared to other fine tuned models, such as Resnet-50 and Inception-v3. The proposed method achieved 100% classification accuracy with the Inception-Resnet-v2 model using a leave-one-out cross-validation strategy. For robustness, the model trained on the SERI dataset was tested on another dataset provided by the Chinese University HongKong (CUHK), also with 100% accuracy. The proposed method is a potentially impactful tool for accurately detecting DME vs. normal cases.

Diabetic macular edema is one of the leading causes of legal blindness worldwide. Early, and accessible, detection of ophthalmological diseases is especially important in developing countries, where there are major limitations to access to specialized medical diagnosis and treatment. Deep learning models, such as deep convolutional neural networks have shown great success in different computer vision tasks. In medical images they have been also applied with great success. The present paper presents a novel strategy based on convolutional neural networks to combine exudates localization and eye fundus images for automatic classification of diabetic macular edema as a support for diabetic retinopathy diagnosis.

Physical exercise (PE) has become an essential tool for different rehabilitation programs. High-intensity exercises (HIEs) have been demonstrated to provide better results in general health conditions, compared with low and moderate-intensity exercises. In this context, monitoring of a patients’ condition is essential to avoid extreme fatigue conditions, which may cause physical and physiological complications. Different methods have been proposed for fatigue estimation, such as: monitoring the subject’s physiological parameters and subjective scales. However, there is still a need for practical procedures that provide an objective estimation, especially for HIEs. In this work, considering that the sit-to-stand (STS) exercise is one of the most implemented in physical rehabilitation, a computational model for estimating fatigue during this exercise is proposed. A study with 60 healthy volunteers was carried out to obtain a data set to develop and evaluate the proposed model. According to the literature, this model estimates three fatigue conditions (low, moderate, and high) by monitoring 32 STS kinematic features and the heart rate from a set of ambulatory sensors (Kinect and Zephyr sensors). Results show that a random forest model composed of 60 sub-classifiers presented an accuracy of 82.5% in the classification task. Moreover, results suggest that the movement of the upper body part is the most relevant feature for fatigue estimation. Movements of the lower body and the heart rate also contribute to essential information for identifying the fatigue condition. This work presents a promising tool for physical rehabilitation.