scholarly journals A Reproducible Protocol to Assess Arrhythmia Vulnerability in Silico: Pacing at the End of the Effective Refractory Period

Author(s):  
Luca Azzolin ◽  
Steffen Schuler ◽  
Axel Loewe ◽  
Olaf Dössel

AbstractIn both clinical and computational studies, different pacing protocols are used to induce arrhythmia and non-inducibility is often considered as the endpoint of treatment. The need for a standardized methodology is urgent since the choice of the protocol used to induce arrhythmia could lead to contrasting results, e.g., in assessing atrial fibrillation (AF) vulnerabilty. Therefore, we propose a novel method – pacing at the end of the effective refractory period (PEERP) – and compare it to state-of-the-art protocols such as phase singularity distribution (PSD) and rapid pacing (RP) in a computational study. All methods were tested by pacing from 227 evenly distributed endocardial points in a bi-atrial geometry. 6 different atrial models were implemented: 4 cases without specific AF-induced remodelling but with decreasing global conduction velocity and 2 persistent AF cases with an increasing amount of fibrosis resembling different substrate remodeling stages. Compared with PSD and RP, PEERP induced a larger variety of arrhythmia complexity requiring, on average, only 2.7 extra-stimuli and 3 s of simulation time to initiate reentry. Moreover, PEERP and PSD were the protocols which unveiled a larger number of areas vulnerable to sustain stable long living reentries compared to RP. Finally, PEERP can foster standardization and reproducibility, since, in contrast to the other protocols, it is a parameter-free method. Furthermore, we discuss its clinical applicability. We conclude that the choice of the inducing protocol has an influence on both initiation and maintenance of AF and we propose and provide PEERP as a reproducible method to assess arrhythmia vulnerability.

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Azzolin ◽  
Steffen Schuler ◽  
Olaf Dössel ◽  
Axel Loewe

In both clinical and computational studies, different pacing protocols are used to induce arrhythmia and non-inducibility is often considered as the endpoint of treatment. The need for a standardized methodology is urgent since the choice of the protocol used to induce arrhythmia could lead to contrasting results, e.g., in assessing atrial fibrillation (AF) vulnerabilty. Therefore, we propose a novel method—pacing at the end of the effective refractory period (PEERP)—and compare it to state-of-the-art protocols, such as phase singularity distribution (PSD) and rapid pacing (RP) in a computational study. All methods were tested by pacing from evenly distributed endocardial points at 1 cm inter-point distance in two bi-atrial geometries. Seven different atrial models were implemented: five cases without specific AF-induced remodeling but with decreasing global conduction velocity and two persistent AF cases with an increasing amount of fibrosis resembling different substrate remodeling stages. Compared with PSD and RP, PEERP induced a larger variety of arrhythmia complexity requiring, on average, only 2.7 extra-stimuli and 3 s of simulation time to initiate reentry. Moreover, PEERP and PSD were the protocols which unveiled a larger number of areas vulnerable to sustain stable long living reentries compared to RP. Finally, PEERP can foster standardization and reproducibility, since, in contrast to the other protocols, it is a parameter-free method. Furthermore, we discuss its clinical applicability. We conclude that the choice of the inducing protocol has an influence on both initiation and maintenance of AF and we propose and provide PEERP as a reproducible method to assess arrhythmia vulnerability.


2015 ◽  
Vol 66 (5) ◽  
pp. 445-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yosuke Nakatani ◽  
Tamotsu Sakamoto ◽  
Kunihiro Nishida ◽  
Naoya Kataoka ◽  
Yoshiaki Yamaguchi ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aysen Degerli ◽  
Mete Ahishali ◽  
Mehmet Yamac ◽  
Serkan Kiranyaz ◽  
Muhammad E. H. Chowdhury ◽  
...  

AbstractComputer-aided diagnosis has become a necessity for accurate and immediate coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) detection to aid treatment and prevent the spread of the virus. Numerous studies have proposed to use Deep Learning techniques for COVID-19 diagnosis. However, they have used very limited chest X-ray (CXR) image repositories for evaluation with a small number, a few hundreds, of COVID-19 samples. Moreover, these methods can neither localize nor grade the severity of COVID-19 infection. For this purpose, recent studies proposed to explore the activation maps of deep networks. However, they remain inaccurate for localizing the actual infestation making them unreliable for clinical use. This study proposes a novel method for the joint localization, severity grading, and detection of COVID-19 from CXR images by generating the so-called infection maps. To accomplish this, we have compiled the largest dataset with 119,316 CXR images including 2951 COVID-19 samples, where the annotation of the ground-truth segmentation masks is performed on CXRs by a novel collaborative human–machine approach. Furthermore, we publicly release the first CXR dataset with the ground-truth segmentation masks of the COVID-19 infected regions. A detailed set of experiments show that state-of-the-art segmentation networks can learn to localize COVID-19 infection with an F1-score of 83.20%, which is significantly superior to the activation maps created by the previous methods. Finally, the proposed approach achieved a COVID-19 detection performance with 94.96% sensitivity and 99.88% specificity.


Author(s):  
Mingliang Xu ◽  
Qingfeng Li ◽  
Jianwei Niu ◽  
Hao Su ◽  
Xiting Liu ◽  
...  

Quick response (QR) codes are usually scanned in different environments, so they must be robust to variations in illumination, scale, coverage, and camera angles. Aesthetic QR codes improve the visual quality, but subtle changes in their appearance may cause scanning failure. In this article, a new method to generate scanning-robust aesthetic QR codes is proposed, which is based on a module-based scanning probability estimation model that can effectively balance the tradeoff between visual quality and scanning robustness. Our method locally adjusts the luminance of each module by estimating the probability of successful sampling. The approach adopts the hierarchical, coarse-to-fine strategy to enhance the visual quality of aesthetic QR codes, which sequentially generate the following three codes: a binary aesthetic QR code, a grayscale aesthetic QR code, and the final color aesthetic QR code. Our approach also can be used to create QR codes with different visual styles by adjusting some initialization parameters. User surveys and decoding experiments were adopted for evaluating our method compared with state-of-the-art algorithms, which indicates that the proposed approach has excellent performance in terms of both visual quality and scanning robustness.


Author(s):  
Takahiro Naito ◽  
Tatsuya Shinagawa ◽  
Takeshi Nishimoto ◽  
Kazuhiro Takanabe

Recent spectroscopic and computational studies concerning the oxygen evolution reaction over iridium oxides are reviewed to provide the state-of-the-art understanding of its reaction mechanism.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (13) ◽  
pp. 1517
Author(s):  
Xinsheng Wang ◽  
Xiyue Wang

True random number generators (TRNGs) have been a research hotspot due to secure encryption algorithm requirements. Therefore, such circuits are necessary building blocks in state-of-the-art security controllers. In this paper, a TRNG based on random telegraph noise (RTN) with a controllable rate is proposed. A novel method of noise array circuits is presented, which consists of digital decoder circuits and RTN noise circuits. The frequency of generating random numbers is controlled by the speed of selecting different gating signals. The results of simulation show that the array circuits consist of 64 noise source circuits that can generate random numbers by a frequency from 1 kHz to 16 kHz.


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