Search

The growing trend of obesity and overweight worldwide has reached epidemic proportions with one third of the global population now considered obese. This is having a significant medical impact on children and adults who are at risk of developing osteoarthritis, coronary heart disease and stroke, type 2 diabetes, cancers, respiratory problems, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. In an attempt to redress the issue, physical activity is being promoted as a fundamental component for maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Recommendations for physical activity levels are issued by most governments as part of their public health measures. However, current techniques and protocols, including those used in laboratory settings, have been criticised. The main concern is that it is not feasible to use multiple pieces of measurement hardware, such as VO2 masks and heart rate monitors, to monitor children in free-living environments due to weight and encumbrance constraints. This has prompted research in the use of wearable sensing and machine learning technology to produce classifications for specific physical activity events. This paper builds on this approach and presents a supervised machine learning method that utilises data obtained from accelerometer sensors worn by children in free-living environments. Our results show that when using an artificial neural network algorithm it is possible to obtain an overall accuracy of 96% using four features from the initial dataset, with sensitivity and specificity values equal to 95% and 99% respectively. Expanding the dataset with interpolated cases, it was possible to improve on these results with 98.8% for accuracy, and 99% for sensitivity and specificity when four features were used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, the rate of preterm births are increasing, thus resulting in significant health, development and economic problems. Current methods for the early detection of such births are inadequate. Nevertheless, there has been some evidence that the analysis of uterine electrical signals, collected from the abdominal surface, could provide an independent and easier way to diagnose true labour and detect the onset of preterm delivery. Using advanced machine learning algorithms, in conjunction with Electrohysterography signal processing, numerous studies have focused on detecting true labour several days prior to the event. However, in this paper, the Electrohysterography signals have been used to detect preterm births. This has been achieved using an open dataset, which contains 262 records for women who delivered at term and 38 who delivered prematurely. Several new features from Electromyography studies have been utilised, as well as feature-ranking techniques to determine their discriminative capabilities in detecting term and preterm records. Seven different artificial neural networks were then used to identify these records. The results illustrate that the combination of the Levenberg–Marquardt trained Feed-Forward Neural Network, Radial Basis Function Neural Network and the Random Neural Network classifiers performed the best, with 91% for sensitivity, 84% for specificity, 94% for the area under the curve and 12% for the mean error rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the use of machine learning techniques for the classification of medical data, specifically for guiding disease modifying therapies for Sickle Cell. Extensive research has indicated that machine learning approaches generate significant improvements when used for the pre-processing of medical time-series data signals and have assisted in obtaining high accuracy in the classification of medical data. The aim of this paper is to present findings for several classes of learning algorithm for medically related problems. The initial case study addressed in this paper involves classifying the dosage of medication required for the treatment of patients with Sickle Cell Disease. We use different machine learning architectures in order to investigate the accuracy and performance within the case study. The main purpose of applying classification approach is to enable healthcare organisations to provide accurate amount of medication. The results obtained from a range of models during our experiments have shown that of the proposed models, recurrent networks produced inferior results in comparison to conventional feedforward neural networks and the Random Forest model. For our dataset, it was found that the Random Forest Classifier produced the highest levels of performance overall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]