Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders, which affects almost 1% of the population worldwide. Anti-epileptic drugs provide adequate treatment for about 70% of epilepsy patients. The remaining 30% of the patients continue to have seizures, which drastically affects their quality of life. In order to obtain efficacy measures of therapeutic interventions for these patients, an objective way to count and document seizures is needed. However, in an outpatient setting, one of the major problems is that seizure diaries kept by patients are unreliable. Automated seizure detection systems could help to objectively quantify seizures. Those detection systems are typically based on full scalp Electroencephalography (EEG). In an outpatient setting, full scalp EEG is of limited use because patients will not tolerate wearing a full EEG cap for long time periods during daily life. There is a need for ...

Epilepsy is a neurological condition that manifests in epileptic seizures as a result of an abnormal, synchronous activity of a large group of neurons. Depending on the affected brain regions, seizures produce various severe clinical symptoms. Epilepsy cannot be cured and in many cases is not controlled by medication either. Surgical resection of the region responsible for generating the epileptic seizures might offer remedy for these patients. Electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measure the changes of brain activity in time over different locations of the brain. As such, they provide valuable information on the nature, the timing and the spatial origin of the epileptic activity. Unfortunately, both techniques record activity of different brain and artefact sources as well. Hence, EEG and fMRI signals are characterised by low signal to noise ratio. Data quality and the vast amount ...

This research focuses on the development of algorithms to extract diagnostic information from the ECG signal, which can be used to improve automatic detection systems and home monitoring solutions. In the first part of this work, a generically applicable algorithm for model selection in kernel principal component analysis is presented, which was inspired by the derivation of respiratory information from the ECG signal. This method not only solves a problem in biomedical signal processing, but more importantly offers a solution to a long-standing problem in the field of machine learning. Next, a methodology to quantify the level of contamination in a segment of ECG is proposed. This level is used to detect artifacts, and to improve the performance of different classifiers, by removing these artifacts from the training set. Furthermore, an evaluation of three different methodologies to compute the ECG-derived ...

Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological diseases that manifests in repetitive epileptic seizures as a result of an abnormal, synchronous activity of a large group of neurons. Depending on the affected brain regions, seizures produce various severe clinical symptoms. There is no cure for epilepsy and sometimes even medication and other therapies, like surgery, vagus nerve stimulation or ketogenic diet, do not control the number of seizures. In that case, long-term (home) monitoring and automatic seizure detection would enable the tracking of the evolution of the disease and improve objective insight in any responses to medical interventions or changes in medical treatment. Especially during the night, supervision is reduced; hence a large number of seizures is missed. In addition, an alarm should be integrated into the automated seizure detection algorithm for severe seizures in order to help the ...

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common sustained cardiac arrhythmia encountered in clinical practice, and one of the main causes of ictus and strokes. Despite the advances in the comprehension of its mechanisms, its thorough characterization and the quantification of its effects on the human heart are still an open issue. In particular, the choice of the most appropriate therapy is frequently a hard task. Radiofrequency catheter ablation (CA) is becoming one of the most popular solutions for the treatment of the disease. Yet, very little is known about its impact on heart substrate during AF, thus leading to an inaccurate selection of positive responders to therapy and a low success rate; hence, the need for advanced signal processing tools able to quantify AF impact on heart substrate and assess the effectiveness of the CA therapy in an objective and ...

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is the most prevalent sleep related breathing disorder, nevertheless subjects suffering from it often remain undiagnosed due to the cumbersome diagnosis procedure. Moreover, the prevalence of OSA is increasing and a better phenotyping of patients is needed in order to prioritize treatment. The goal of this thesis was to tackle those challenges in OSA diagnosis. Additionally, two main algorithmic contributions which are generally applicable were proposed within this thesis. The binary interval coded scoring algorithm was extended to multilevel problems and novel monotonicity constraints were introduced. Moreover, improvements to the random-forest based feature selection were proposed including the use of the Cohen’s kappa value, patient independent validation, and further feature pruning steered by the correlation between features. These novel methods were applied together with classification and feature selection methods from the literature to improve the OSA ...

Around 10 percent of all human births is premature, which means that annually about 15 million babies are born before 37 completed weeks of gestation. About one third of the admissions to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) consists of this patient group. Due to complications, 1 million babies die from premature delivery, and it is therefore the most important cause of neonatal death. In general, premature and immature babies have a high risk for neurological abnormalities by maturation in extra-uterine life. Even though improved health care has increased the survival changes of these neonates, they are sensitive to brain damage and consequently, neurocognitive disabilities. Nowadays, critical information about the brain development can be extracted from the electroencephalography (EEG). Clinical experts visually assess evolving EEG characteristics over both short and long periods to evaluate maturation of patients at risk and, ...

Localizing the bioelectric phenomena originating from the cerebral cortex and evoked by auditory and somatosensory stimuli are clear objectives to both understand how the brain works and to recognize different pathologies. Diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, schizophrenia and epilepsy are intensively studied to find a cure or accurate diagnosis. Epilepsy is considered the disease with major prevalence within disorders with neurological origin. The recurrent and sudden incidence of seizures can lead to dangerous and possibly life-threatening situations. Since disturbance of consciousness and sudden loss of motor control often occur without any warning, the ability to predict epileptic seizures would reduce patients' anxiety, thus considerably improving quality of life and safety. The common procedure for epilepsy seizure detection is based on brain activity monitorization via electroencephalogram (EEG) data. This process consumes a lot of time, especially in the case of long ...

A complex physical system like the human brain can only be comprehended by the use of a combination of various medical imaging techniques, each of which shed light on only a specific aspect of the neural processes that take place beneath the skull. Electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) are two such modalities, which enable the study of brain (dys)function. While the EEG is measured with a limited set of scalp electrodes which record rapid electrical changes resulting from neural activity, fMRI offers a superior spatial resolution at the expense of only picking up slow fluctuations of oxygen concentration that takes place near active brain cells. Hence, combining these very complementary modalities is an appealing, but complicated task due to their heterogeneous nature. In this thesis, we devise advanced signal processing techniques which integrate the multimodal data stemming from ...

All human actions involve motor control. Even the simplest movement requires the coordinated recruitment of many muscles, orchestrated by neuronal circuits in the brain and the spinal cord. As a consequence, lesions affecting the central nervous system, such as stroke, can lead to a wide range of motor impairments. While a certain degree of recovery can often be achieved by harnessing the plasticity of the motor hierarchy, patients typically struggle to regain full motor control. In this context, technology-assisted interventions offer the prospect of intense, controllable and quantifiable motor training. Yet, clinical outcomes remain comparable to conventional approaches, suggesting the need for a paradigm shift towards customized knowledge-driven treatments to fully exploit their potential. In this thesis, we argue that a detailed understanding of healthy and impaired motor pathways can foster the development of therapies optimally engaging plasticity. To this ...

This work has, as its objective, the development of non-invasive and low-cost systems for monitoring and automatic diagnosing specific neonatal diseases by means of the analysis of suitable video signals. We focus on monitoring infants potentially at risk of diseases characterized by the presence or absence of rhythmic movements of one or more body parts. Seizures and respiratory diseases are specifically considered, but the approach is general. Seizures are defined as sudden neurological and behavioural alterations. They are age-dependent phenomena and the most common sign of central nervous system dysfunction. Neonatal seizures have onset within the 28th day of life in newborns at term and within the 44th week of conceptional age in preterm infants. Their main causes are hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy, intracranial haemorrhage, and sepsis. Studies indicate an incidence rate of neonatal seizures of 2‰ live births, 11‰ for preterm ...

This thesis focuses on the design of various automatic signal processing algorithms to extract information from physiological signals of preterm infants. Overall, the aim was to improve the neurodevelopmental outcome of the neonate. More specifically, three main research objectives were carried out. The first objective was to describe the maturation of neonates during their stay in the neonatal intensive care unit. The second objective was to assess the stress and pain in premature infants and their impact on the development of neonates. The third objective was to predict developmental disabilities, such as autism. The first part of this thesis presents an extensive overview of various developmental models to describe the maturation of premature infants. Three main strategies were proposed. The first strategy proposed an investigation of EEG connectivity networks. A variety of functional and effective connectivity methods were combined with ...

Gliomas represent about 80% of all malignant primary brain tumors. Despite recent advancements in glioma research, patient outcome remains poor. The 5 year survival rate of the most common and most malignant subtype, i.e. glioblastoma, is about 5%. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become the imaging modality of choice in the management of brain tumor patients. Conventional MRI (cMRI) provides excellent soft tissue contrast without exposing the patient to potentially harmful ionizing radiation. Over the past decade, advanced MRI modalities, such as perfusion-weighted imaging (PWI), diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) and magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) have gained interest in the clinical field, and their added value regarding brain tumor diagnosis, treatment planning and follow-up has been recognized. Tumor segmentation involves the imaging-based delineation of a tumor and its subcompartments. In gliomas, segmentation plays an important role in treatment planning as well ...

Accurate detection of ischemic patterns in ECG is important for correct diagnosis of myocardial ischemia or infarct and further treatment of the patients. Therefore, this research area is highly topical for the past few decades. The thesis introduces the results of comprehensive study on rabbit isolated heart, where many various aspects of ECG acquisition, processing and analysis have been addressed. Particularly, effects of ischemia, increased left ventricular mass and voltage-sensitive dye di-4-ANEPPS on heart electrical activity were evaluated by analysis of various ECG and VCG parameters. The impact of the last two phenomena (frequent in animal studies) on electrocardiographic ischemia manifestations and detection was described quantitatively. Various approaches for ischemia detection via advanced supervised classification tools and feature selection methods were proposed and evaluated by cross-validation technique considering such important aspects as electrode placement, features and classification models used, definition ...

Cardiovascular diseases are a growing problem in today’s society. The World Health Organization (WHO) reported that these diseases make up about 30% of total global deaths and that heart diseases have no geographic, gender or socioeconomic boundaries. Therefore, detecting cardiac irregularities early-stage and a correct treatment are very important. However, this requires a good physiological understanding of the cardiovascular system. The heart is stimulated electrically by the brain via the autonomic nervous system, where sympathetic and vagal pathways are always interacting and modulating heart rate. Continuous monitoring of the heart activity is obtained by means of an ElectroCardioGram (ECG). Studying the fluctuations of heart beat intervals over time reveals a lot of information and is called heart rate variability (HRV) analysis. A reduction of HRV has been reported in several cardiological and noncardiological diseases. Moreover, HRV also has a prognostic ...