0000000000077694

AUTHOR

Aamir Saeed Malik

Hyperspectral venous image quality assessment for optimum illumination range selection based on skin tone characteristics

Background Subcutaneous veins localization is usually performed manually by medical staff to find suitable vein to insert catheter for medication delivery or blood sample function. The rule of thumb is to find large and straight enough vein for the medication to flow inside of the selected blood vessel without any obstruction. The problem of peripheral difficult venous access arises when patient’s veins are not visible due to any reason like dark skin tone, presence of hair, high body fat or dehydrated condition, etc. Methods To enhance the visibility of veins, near infrared imaging systems is used to assist medical staff in veins localization process. Optimum illumination is crucial to obt…

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Subcutaneous veins detection and backprojection method using Frangi vesselness filter

Blood vessels detection is a common task performed in numerous medical procedures. During regular medical treatments venipuncture procedures are performed for invasive medication and blood sampling. Near infrared imaging technology can be used to visualize the subcutaneous veins in cases of difficult venous access. In this paper the methods for veins centerline detection and back projection is presented. In order to highlight the suitable veins for venipuncture, the centerline of larger veins are detected and back projected to the original image. The method is applied on the near infrared images of subjects selected from four different classes of skin tone. This can be helpful to medical st…

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Motorcyclists Safety System to avoid Rear End Collisions based on Acoustic Signatures

International audience; In many Asian countries, motorcyclists have a higher fatality rate as compared to other vehicles. Among many other factors, rear end collisions are also contributing for these fatalities. Collision detection systems can be useful to minimize these accidents. However, the designing of efficient and cost effective collision detection system for motorcyclist is still a major challenge. In this paper, an acoustic information based, cost effective and efficient collision detection system is proposed for motorcycle applications. The proposed technique uses the Short time Fourier Transform (STFT) to extract the features from the audio signal and Principal component analysis…

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Video-Based Heartbeat Rate Measuring Method Using Ballistocardiography

International audience; Video-based heartbeat rate measurement is a rapidly growing application in remote health monitoring. Video-based heartbeat rate measuring methods operate mainly by estimating photoplethysmography or ballistocardiography signals. These methods operate by estimating the microscopic color change in the face or by estimating the microscopic rigid motion of the head/facial skin. However, the robustness to motion artifacts caused by illumination variance and motion variance of the subject poses main challenge. We present a video-based heartbeat rate measuring framework to overcome these problems by using the principle of ballistocardiography. In this paper, we proposed a b…

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An efficient method for subcutaneous veins localization using Near Infrared imaging

In the majority of the medical treatments, intravenous catheterization is the most important phase in which skilled medical practitioners locate the best vein and perform catheterization process for medication or blood sampling. Due to the different physiological characteristics, mainly darker skin tone, scars or dehydrated condition of patients, medical staff stumbles in localization of veins. This paper proposes an enhanced method which intends to overcome the difficulty faced by medical staff in veins localization for intravenous catheterization. Using the Near Infrared imaging and image processing algorithms a novel approach for veins visualization is proposed. In order to have complete…

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An Auto-Operated Telepresence System for the Nao Humanoid Robot

International audience; This paper presents the development process of an auto-operated telepresence system for the Nao humanoid robot with the main functionality of directing the robot autonomously to an operator-defined target location within a static workspace. The workspace is observed by an array of top-view cameras, which are used to localize the robot by means of a color-based marker detection technique. The system is accessible world-wide to the remote operator through any Internet-capable device via a web-based control interface. The web server responsible for coordinating the communication between system and operator is hosted on a cloud-based infrastructure online. The system was…

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Subcutaneous Veins Depth Estimation Method Using Monte Carlo Simulations

International audience; Subcutaneous veins localization is basic and important step for any intravenous medication administration. Due to different physiological characteristics, mainly darker skin tone, scars or dehydrated condition of patients, medical staff face difficulty in veins localization. Through near infrared imaging technology the veins can be visualized due to high contrast between veins and skin tissue in this modality. Information on the depth of veins is equally important for proper catheterization or venipuncture procedures. Patients have different veins depth due to the different amount of fat present in the subcutaneous layer. The depth of veins from the skin surface cann…

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Effect of Motion Artifact on Digital Camera Based Heart Rate Measurement

International audience; Depression is one of the most prevalent mental disorders, burdening many people world-wide. A system with the potential of serving as a decision support system is proposed, based on novel features extracted from facial expression geometry and speech, by interpreting non-verbal manifestations of depression. The proposed system has been tested both in gender independent and gender based modes, and with different fusion methods. The algorithms were evaluated for several combinations of parameters and classification schemes, on the dataset provided by the Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge of 2013 and 2014. The proposed framework achieved a precision of 94.8% for detecting p…

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Introducing the Concept of Hyperactivity in Multi Agent Systems

International audience; Software Agents are no longer the simple communication gateways for devices to interconnect using one or more networks. With Multi Agent Systems contributing in a wide spectrum of intelligent systems, the Agents are in a more proactive role than just being responsible for passing messages between their respective base systems. Agent Relation Charts and the Hyperactive Transaction Model in general is one of the recent attempts of developing a multi-view design model for Multi Agent Systems. The model has made a clear distinction in the regular and intelligent activities of an agent. Based on these differences, the agents are classified into three main categories named…

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Noise Robustness Analysis of Point Cloud Descriptors

In this paper, we investigate the effect of noise on 3D point cloud descriptors. Various types of point cloud descriptors have been introduced in the recent years due to advances in computing power, which makes processing point cloud data more feasible. Most of these descriptors describe the orientation difference between pairs of 3D points in the object and represent these differences in a histogram. Earlier studies dealt with the performances of different point cloud descriptors; however, no study has ever discussed the effect of noise on the descriptors performances. This paper presents a comparison of performance for nine different local and global descriptors amidst 10 varying levels o…

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Fusion of CNN and sparse representation for threat estimation near power lines and poles infrastructure using aerial stereo imagery

Abstract Fires or electrical hazards and accidents can occur if vegetation is not controlled or cleared around overhead power lines, resulting in serious risks to people and property and significant costs to the community. There are numerous blackouts due to interfering the trees with the power transmission lines in hilly and urban areas. Power distribution companies are facing a challenge to monitor the vegetation to avoid blackouts and flash-over threats. Recently, several methods have been developed for vegetation monitoring; however, existing methods are either not accurate or could not provide better disparity map in the textureless region. Moreover, are not able to handle depth discon…

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MULTISPECTRAL VENOUS IMAGES ANALYSIS FOR OPTIMUM ILLUMINATION SELECTION

International audience; Intravenous (IV) catheterization is the most important phase in medical practices of daily life. It is hard to localize veins in patients who have deep veins, minor age or dark skin; hence multiple attempts become indispensable for proper catheterization in such cases. Near Infrared (NIR) Imaging allow to visualize the veins underneath the skin of persons having non-visibility of veins problem. This paper reports the pre-selection of illuminants that ensure best veins/tissues contrast for patients having different skin tone. The sample subjects have been divided in four different classes based on the Luminance value of their skin tone in order to extract the best ill…

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