Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), including asymptomatic myocardial ischemia, angina, myocardial infarction, and ischemic heart failure, are the leading cause of death globally. Early detection and treatment of CVDs significantly contribute to the prevention or delay of cardiovascular death. Electrocardiogram (ECG) records the electrical impulses generated by heart muscles, which reflect regular or irregular beating activity. Computer-aided techniques provide fast and accurate tools to identify CVDs using a patient’s ECG signal, which have achieved great success in recent years. Latest computational diagnostic techniques based on ECG signals for estimating CVDs conditions are summarized here. The procedure of ECG signals analysis is discussed in several subsections, including data preprocessing, feature engineering, classification, and application. In particular, the End-to-End models integrate feature extraction and classification into learning algorithms, which not only greatly simplifies the process of data analysis, but also shows excellent accuracy and robustness. Portable devices enable users to monitor their cardiovascular status at any time, bringing new scenarios as well as challenges to the application of ECG algorithms. Computational diagnostic techniques for ECG signal analysis show great potential for helping health care professionals, and their application in daily life benefits both patients and sub-healthy people.
Metal implants and other high-density objects in patients introduce severe streaking artifacts in CT images, compromising image quality and diagnostic performance. Although various methods were developed for CT metal artifact reduction over the past decades, including the latest dual-domain deep networks, remaining metal artifacts are still clinically challenging in many cases. Here we extend the state-of-the-art dual-domain deep network approach into a quad-domain counterpart so that all the features in the sinogram, image, and their corresponding Fourier domains are synergized to eliminate metal artifacts optimally without compromising structural subtleties. Our proposed quad-domain network for MAR, referred to as Quad-Net, takes little additional computational cost since the Fourier transform is highly efficient, and works across the four receptive fields to learn both global and local features as well as their relations. Specifically, we first design a Sinogram-Fourier Restoration Network (SFR-Net) in the sinogram domain and its Fourier space to faithfully inpaint metal-corrupted traces. Then, we couple SFR-Net with an Image-Fourier Refinement Network (IFR-Net) which takes both an image and its Fourier spectrum to improve a CT image reconstructed from the SFR-Net output using cross-domain contextual information. Quad-Net is trained on clinical datasets to minimize a composite loss function. Quad-Net does not require precise metal masks, which is of great importance in clinical practice. Our experimental results demonstrate the superiority of Quad-Net over the state-of-the-art MAR methods quantitatively, visually, and statistically. The Quad-Net code is publicly available at https://github.com/longzilicart/Quad-Net.