Search

The accurate measurement of blood pressure (BP) is an important prerequisite for the reliable diagnosis and efficient management of hypertension and other medical conditions. Office Blood Pressure Measurement (OBP) is a technique performed in-office with the sphygmomanometer, while Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring (ABPM) is a technique that measures blood pressure during 24h. The BP fluctuations also depend on other factors such as physical activity, temperature, mood, age, sex, any pathologies, a hormonal activity that may intrinsically influence the differences between OBP and ABPM. The aim of this study is to examine the possible influence of sex on the discrepancies between OBP and ABPM in 872 subjects with known or suspected hypertension. A significant correlation was observed between OBP and ABPM mean values calculated during the day, night and 24h (ABPMday, ABPMnight, ABPM24h) in both groups (p<0.0001). The main finding of this study is that no difference between sexes was observed in the relation between OBP and mean ABMP values except between systolic OBP and systolic ABPM during the night. In addition, this study showed a moderate correlation between BPs obtained with the two approaches with a great dispersion around the regression line which suggests that the two approaches cannot be used interchangeably.

Over the years motor deficit in Parkinson's Disease (PD) patients was largely studied, however, no consistent pattern of relations between quantitative electroencephalography (qEEG) and motor scales emerged. There is a general lack of information on the relation between EEG changes and scales related to specific motor deficits. Therefore, the study aimed to investigate the relation between brain oscillatory activity alterations (EEG power bands) and most used PD-related motor deficit scales. A positive correlation was found between the freezing of the gait questionnaire (FOGQ) and delta spectral power band (rho=0.67; p=0.008), while a negative correlation with the same scale was observed in the alpha spectral power band (rho=-0.59, p=0.027). Additionally, motor scores measure by motor part of Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) correlated directly with theta (rho=0.55, p=0.040) and inversely with beta EEG power band (rho=-0.77, p=0.001). No significant correlation was found between spectral powers and Hoehn and Yahr (H&Y), BERG (Berg K. et. al. 1995), Modified Parkinson Activity Scale (MPAS), Six-Minute Walk Test (6MWT) and Timed Up and Go Test (TUG). In conclusion, our study supports the earlier findings suggesting a link between EEG slowing and motor decline, providing more insight into the relation between EEG alteration and deficits in different motor domains. These findings indicate that EEG assessment may be a useful biomarker for objective monitoring of progression and neurophysiological effect of rehabilitation approaches in PD's.

Blood Pressure (BP) is a biological signal related to the cardiovascular system that inevitably is affected by ageing. Moreover, it is also influenced by the presence of cardiovascular risk factors. To evaluate how the relationship be-tween BP and age changes with the presence of risk factors in hypertensive and normotensive subjects, we analyzed 880 subjects with and without smoking, obe-sity, diabetes mellitus and dyslipidemia. A regression line fitted each BP/Age relation calculated separately for normotensive and hypertensive subjects with and without risk factors. For each of the four conditions the office and the 24-hour ambulatory BP monitoring (ABPM) were considered. In subjects with and without risk factors, the slopes of the Systolic BP/Age relation were higher in hypertensive than in normotensive subjects in both office and ABPM conditions. Moreover, the presence of risk factors modified the Systolic BP/Age relation in hypertensive subjects by using either office or ABPM measurements. Finally, we confirmed that the difference between the two modalities depends on age too.

Blood Pressure (BP) and Heart Rate (HR) provide information on clin-ical condition along 24h. Both signals present circadian changes due to sympa-thetic/parasympathetic control system that influence the relationship between them. Moreover, also the gender could modify this relation, acting on both con-trol systems. Some studies, using office measurements examined the BP/HR re-lation, highlighting a direct association between the two variables, linked to sus-pected coronary heart disease. Nevertheless, till now such relation has not been studied yet using ambulatory technique that is known to lead to additional prog-nostic information about cardiovascular risks. In order to examine in a more ac-curate way this relation, in this work we evaluate the influence of gender on the BP/HR relationship by using hour-to-hour 24h ambulatory measurements. Data coming from 122 female and 50 male normotensive subjects were recorded using a Holter Blood Pressure Monitor and the parameters of the linear regression fit-ting BP/HR were calculated. Results confirmed those obtained in previous stud-ies using punctual office measures in males and underlined a significant relation between Diastolic BP and HR during each hour of the day in females; a different trend in the BP/HR relation between genders was found only during night-time. Moreover, the circadian rhythm of BP/HR is similar in both genders but with different values of HR and BP at different times of the day.

The use of office measurement of Blood Pressure (BP) as well as of the mean on day-time, on night-time or on 24h does not accurately describe the changes of the BP circadian rhythm. Moreover, several risk factors affect this rhythm but until now possible alterations, due to the presence of such risk factors considered separately, were not been yet studied. Cigarette smoking is one of the most relevant risk factors increasing cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. The aim of this study is to evaluate quantitatively and with a suitable temporal detail how the smoking influences the BP circadian rhythm in normotensive and hypertensive subjects excluding those who presented other risk factors like obesity, dyslipidemia and diabetes mellitus. Holter BP monitoring coming from 618 subjects was used and the behaviour on 24h was examined separately in normotensive and hypertensive subjects either smokers or non-smokers. Four intervals with alternate different characteristics were found in the BP rhythm and regression lines approximated them in order to evaluate the changing rate of BP in each period. Results showed higher values from 10:00 to 02:00 in hypertensive smokers than non-smokers and significant differences between normotensive smokers and non-smokers between 10:00 and 19:00. The changing rate between 10:00 and 14:30 was higher in non-smokers than in smokers for both normotensive and hypertensive subjects while the opposite was found in the other three periods. The different velocity rates of BP changes during 24h, could be associated with different risk levels of cardiovascular disease., Comment: GNB conference

The study reports the performance of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients to operate Motor-Imagery based Brain-Computer Interface (MI-BCI) and compares three selected pre-processing and classification approaches. The experiment was conducted on 7 PD patients who performed a total of 14 MI-BCI sessions targeting lower extremities. EEG was recorded during the initial calibration phase of each session, and the specific BCI models were produced by using Spectrally weighted Common Spatial Patterns (SpecCSP), Source Power Comodulation (SPoC) and Filter-Bank Common Spatial Patterns (FBCSP) methods. The results showed that FBCSP outperformed SPoC in terms of accuracy, and both SPoC and SpecCSP in terms of the false-positive ratio. The study also demonstrates that PD patients were capable of operating MI-BCI, although with lower accuracy.

There is a growing research interest towards the use of wireless IMU sensors to assess disability, monitor progress and provide feedback to patients on range of motion and movement performance during upper body rehabilitation. The quality of movement in patients with adhesive capsulitis and relative treatment efficacy has not yet been studied using inertial and magnetic sensors. The aim of this study was to investigate the possibility to quantitatively evaluate capsulate-related deficit versus healthy controls and to assess treatment efficacy by measurement of shoulder kinematic parameters with ISEO protocol using inertial and magnetic measurement system technology. We enrolled 6 patients with adhesive capsulitis (AC) who underwent the experimental assessment by using a set of wireless IMU sensors at the baseline (T0) and after the 15 one-hour individual sessions of physiotherapy (T1). The range of motion in elevation, abduction and the scapulohumeral rhythm kinematic parameters were extracted from measurements performed in enrolled AC patients and in 7 healthy controls. The results of this preliminary study showed that proposed approach based on measurement of shoulder kinematic parameters with ISEO protocol using IMU wireless sensors can be useful in mobility deficit assessment of patients with adhesive capsulitis, as well as for monitoring of treatment efficacy and its further personalization.

Motor-Imagery based BCI (MI-BCI) neurorehabilitation can improve locomotor ability and reduce the deficit symptoms in Parkinson's Disease patients. Advanced Motor-Imagery BCI methods are needed to overcome the accuracy and time-related MI BCI calibration challenges in such patients. In this study, we proposed a Multi-session FBCSP (msFBCSP) based on inter-session transfer learning and we investigated its performance compared to the single-session based FBSCP. The main result of this study is the significantly improved accuracy obtained by proposed msFBCSP compared to single-session FBCSP in PD patients (median 81.3%, range 41.2-100.0% vs median 61.1%, range 25.0-100.0%, respectively; p<0.001). In conclusion, this study proposes a transfer learning-based multi-session based FBCSP approach which allowed to significantly improve calibration accuracy in MI BCI performed on PD patients.

The diagnosis of heart diseases is a difficult task generally addressed by an appropriate examination of patients clinical data. Recently, the use of heart rate variability (HRV) analysis as well as of some machine learning algorithms, has proved to be a valuable support in the diagnosis process. However, till now, ischemic heart disease (IHD) has been diagnosed on the basis of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) applied only to signs, symptoms and sequential ECG and coronary angiography, an invasive tool, while could be probably identified in a non-invasive way by using parameters extracted from HRV, a signal easily obtained from the ECG. In this study, 18 non-invasive features (age, gender, left ventricular ejection fraction and 15 obtained from HRV) of 243 subjects (156 normal subjects and 87 IHD patients) were used to train and validate a series of several ANN, different for number of input and hidden nodes. The best result was obtained using 7 input parameters and 7 hidden nodes with an accuracy of 98.9% and 82% for the training and validation dataset, respectively.

Motor-imagery based brain-computer interfaces (MI-BCI) have the potential to become ground-breaking technologies for neurorehabilitation, the reestablishment of non-muscular communication and commands for patients suffering from neuronal disorders and disabilities, but also outside of clinical practice, for video game control and other entertainment purposes. However, due to the noisy nature of the used EEG signal, reliable BCI systems require specialized procedures for features optimization and extraction. This paper compares the two approaches, the Common Spatial Patterns with Linear Discriminant Analysis classifier (CSP-LDA), widely used in BCI for extracting features in Motor Imagery (MI) tasks, and the Dual-Augmented Lagrangian (DAL) framework with three different regularization methods: group sparsity with row groups (DAL-GLR), dual-spectrum (DAL-DS) and l1-norm regularization (DAL-L1). The test has been performed on 7 healthy subjects performing 5 BCI-MI sessions each. The preliminary results show that DAL-GLR method outperforms standard CSP-LDA, presenting 6.9% lower misclassification error (p-value = 0.008) and demonstrate the advantage of DAL framework for MI-BCI.