Monitoring of vital signs is a key tool in medical diagnostics to asses the onset and the evolution of several diseases. Among fundamental vital parameters, such as the hearth rate, blood pressure and body temperature, the Respiratory Rate (RR) plays an important role. For this reason, respiration needs to be carefully monitored in order to detect potential signs or events indicating possible changes of health conditions. Monitoring of the respiration is generally carried out in hospital and clinical environments by the use of expensive devices with several sensors connected to the patient's body. A new research trend, in order to reduce healthcare service costs and make monitoring of vital signs more comfortable, is the development of low-cost systems which may allow remote and contactless monitoring; in such a context, an appealing method is to rely on video processing-based solutions. In ...

Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological diseases, especially in children. And although the majority of patients can be treated through medication or surgery (70%-75%), a significant group of patients cannot be treated. For this latter group of patients it is advisable to follow the evolution of the disease. This can be done through a long-term automatic monitoring, which gives an objective measure of the number of seizures that the patient has, for example during the night. On the other hand, there is a reduced social control overnight and the parents or caregivers can miss some seizures. In severe seizures, it is sometimes necessary, however, to avoid dangerous situations during or after the seizure (e.g. the danger of suffocation caused by vomiting or a position that obstructs breathing, or the risk of injury during violent movements), and to comfort ...

Brain function requires a continuous flow of oxygen and glucose. An insufficient supply for a few minutes during the first period of life may have severe consequences or even result in death. This happens in one to six infants per 1000 live term births. Therefore, there is a high need for a method which can enable bedside brain monitoring to identify those neonates at risk and be able to start the treatment in time. The most important currently available technology to continuously monitor brain function is electroEncephaloGraphy (or EEG). Unfortunately, visual EEG analysis requires particular skills which are not always present round the clock in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). Even if those skills are available it is laborsome to manually analyse many hours of EEG. The lack of time and skill are the main reasons why EEG is ...

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 ...

Worldwide approximately 11% of the babies are born before 37 weeks of gestation. The survival rates of these prematurely born infants have steadily increased during the last decades as a result of the technical and medical progress in the neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). The focus of the NICUs has therefore gradually evolved from increasing life chances to improving quality of life. In this respect, promoting and supporting optimal brain development is crucial. Because these neonates are born during a period of rapid growth and development of the brain, they are susceptible to brain damage and therefore vulnerable to adverse neurodevelopmental outcome. In order to identify patients at risk of long-term disabilities, close monitoring of the neurological function during the first critical weeks is a primary concern in the current NICUs. Electroencephalography (EEG) is a valuable tool for continuous noninvasive ...

Every year, an estimated 15 million babies are born preterm, that is, before 37 weeks of gestation. This number is rising in all countries and currently represents more than 1 in 10 babies, affecting families all over the world. During the last decades, the survival rate of prematurely born neonates has steadily increased, mainly as a result of medical and technical progress in neonatal intensive care. The very preterm infants, which represent up to 10% of the preterm infants in the EU, remain at risk for adverse outcome and neurodevelopmental disability. These maladaptive outcomes have a severe effect on the children’s quality of life and a huge economic impact on society. In order to reduce this burden and improve neonatal care in general, appropriate tools need to be developed to identify the neonates with a higher risk of adverse outcomes. ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The fact that a third of a human life is spent in a bed indicates the essential character of sleep. While some people might opt voluntarily for sleep deprivation, others don’t get to choose. Their healthy pattern of sleep is disrupted due to sleep disorders such as sleep apnea, insomnia and restless legs syndrome. Most clinical diagnoses revolve around complaints of excessive daytime sleepiness. People usually wait quite long however before contacting professional help, and might only do so when complaints have gone from minor to serious. It can be argued that people with minor complaints will have negligible compliance to rather obtrusive therapies, and should not be treated with pharmaceuticals. However, cognitive and behavioral therapy has proven its effectiveness for clinically diagnosed patients in different domains, and might thus also enhance the quality of life for people with minor ...

Preterm birth is a major pediatric health problem that perturbs the genetically determined program of corticogenesis of the developing brain. As a consequence, prematurity has been strongly associated with adverse long-term neurodevelopmental outcome that may persist even into adulthood. Early characterization of the underlying neuronal mechanisms and early identification of infants at risk is of paramount importance since it allows better development of early therapeutic interventions aiming to prevent adverse outcomes through resilience. This dissertation aims to investigate the consequences of preterm birth on brain function and structure and their relation to adverse neurodevelopmental outcome, as well as to unveil the effect of an early music intervention on brain function. Research to date has mainly focused on the effect of early interventions on the long-term outcome but not on the effect of those interventions on brain function in preterm populations. ...

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 ...

The present doctoral thesis aims towards the development of new long-term, multi-channel, audio-visual processing techniques for the analysis of bioacoustics phenomena. The effort is focused on the study of the physiology of the gastrointestinal system, aiming at the support of medical research for the discovery of gastrointestinal motility patterns and the diagnosis of functional disorders. The term "processing" in this case is quite broad, incorporating the procedures of signal processing, content description, manipulation and analysis, that are applied to all the recorded bioacoustics signals, the auxiliary audio-visual surveillance information (for the monitoring of experiments and the subjects' status), and the extracted audio-video sequences describing the abdominal sound-field alterations. The thesis outline is as follows. The main objective of the thesis, which is the technological support of medical research, is presented in the first chapter. A quick problem definition is initially ...