Reduction of Artifacts in Capacitive Electrocardiogram Signals of Driving Subjects

The development of smart cars with e-health services allows monitoring of the health condition of the driver. Driver comfort is preserved by the use of capacitive electrodes, but the recorded signal is characterized by large artifacts. This paper proposes a method for reducing artifacts from the ECG signal recorded by capacitive electrodes (cECG) in moving subjects. Two dominant artifact types are coarse and slow-changing artifacts. Slow-changing artifacts removal by classical filtering is not feasible as the spectral bands of artifacts and cECG overlap, mostly in the band from 0.5 to 15 Hz. We developed a method for artifact removal, based on estimating the fluctuation around linear trend, for both artifact types, including a condition for determining the presence of coarse artifacts. The method was validated on cECG recorded while driving, with the artifacts predominantly due to the movements, as well as on cECG recorded while lying, where the movements were performed according to a predefined protocol. The proposed method eliminates 96% to 100% of the coarse artifacts, while the slow-changing artifacts are completely reduced for the recorded cECG signals larger than 0.3 V. The obtained results are in accordance with the opinion of medical experts. The method is intended for reliable extraction of cardiovascular parameters to monitor driver fatigue status.

CONTROL SYSTEM FOR NEEDLE INSERTION INTO THE PERIPHERAL VENOUS VESSEL

Предложен новый способ контроля введения инъекционной иглы в просвет вены на основе измерений электрического импеданса с помощью смешанной системы электродов, состоящей из биполярного и тетраполярного звеньев. Исследованы альтернативные схемы расположения электродов при проведении контроля венозной пункции биоимпедансным методом - они имеют более сложную конструкцию, используют дорогостоящие специализированные коаксиальные иглы, не позволяют однозначно определить факт прокола стенки венозного сосуда, нуждаются в дополнительной фильтрации регистрируемого сигнала с целью корректной интерпретации результата. Эффективность предложенной методики проверялась в ходе экспериментальных исследований на 5 добровольцах. Результаты экспериментов позволили идентифицировать 4 стадии нахождения инъекционной иглы относительно верхней конечности: нет касания, касание кожного покрова, нахождение под кожей коже, попадание в просвет вены. Идентификация положений инъекционной иглы происходит в реальном времени без дополнительной фильтрации регистрируемого сигнала. Метод позволяет обнаружить момент прокола стенки венозного сосуда стандартной инъекционной иглой, что в дальнейшем позволит сэкономить на изготовлении специализированных многослойных игольчатых электродов и внедрить данный способ контроля за проведением венепункции в медицинскую практику. Дальнейшее развитие предложенного подхода предполагает идентификацию двойного прокола вены, дифференцирование типа ткани в процессе введения иглы и исследование возможности определения типа кровеносного сосуда A new method for controlling the penetration of an injection needle into the vein based on measurements of electrical impedance using a mixed system of electrodes consisting of bipolar and tetrapolar parts is proposed. Alternative schemes for the arrangement of electrodes for monitoring venous puncture using the bioimpedance method have been investigated - they have a more complex design, use expensive specialized coaxial needles, do not allow to unambiguously determine the fact of a puncture of the venous vessel wall, require additional filtering of the recorded signal in order to correctly interpret the result. The effectiveness of the proposed technique was tested in experimental studies on 5 volunteers. The results of the experiments made it possible to identify 4 stages of finding the injection needle relative to the upper limb: no touching, touching the skin, being under the skin of the skin, getting into the lumen of the vein. Identification of the positions of the injection needle occurs in real time without additional filtering of the recorded signal. The method allows detecting the moment of puncture of the wall of a venous vessel with a standard injection needle, which in the future will save on the manufacture of specialized multilayer needle electrodes and introduce this method of monitoring venipuncture into medical practice. Further development of the proposed approach involves the identification of a double vein puncture, differentiation of tissue type during needle insertion, and investigation of the possibility of determining the type of blood vessel

Audio Enhancement of Physical Models of Musical Instruments Using Optimal Correction Factors: The Recorder Case

A simulation of a musical instrument is considered to be a successful one when there is a good resemblance between the model’s synthesized sound and the real instrument’s sound. In this work, we propose the integration of physical modeling (PM) methods with an optimization process to regulate a generated digital signal. Its goal is to find a new set of values of the PM’s parameters’ that would lead to a synthesized signal matching as much as possible to reference signals corresponding to the physical musical instrument. The reference signals can be: (a) described by their acoustic characteristics (e.g., fundamental frequencies, inharmonicity, etc.) and/or (b) the signals themselves (e.g., impedances, recordings, etc.). We put this method into practice for a commercial recorder, simulated using the digital waveguides’ PM technique. The reference signals, in our case, are the recorded signals of the physical instrument. The degree of similarity between the synthesized (PM) and the recorded signal (musical instrument) is calculated by the signals’ linear cross-correlation. Our results show that the adoption of the optimization process resulted in more realistic synthesized signals by (a) enhancing the degree of similarity between the synthesized and the recorded signal (the average absolute Pearson Correlation Coefficient increased from 0.13 to 0.67), (b) resolving mistuning issues (the average absolute deviation of the synthesized from the recorded signals’ pitches reduced from 40 cents to the non-noticeable level of 2 cents) and (c) similar sound color characteristics and matched overtones (the average absolute deviation of the synthesized from the recorded signals’ first five partials reduced from 41 cents to 2 cents).

An efficient physic-based event detection algorithm inspired by music information retrieval

<p>In the last decade, the increasing number and spatial density of seismological stations provide unprecedented opportunities for recording various natural and human-related events in continuous records. Diverse methods have been proposed for event detection, classification, and characterization, but few of them are based on the physical properties of the events. In this study, inspired by music information retrieval methods such as audio fingerprinting, we present a time-efficient event detection method based on capturing the physical properties of seismic signatures such as corner frequency, high-frequency fall-off, and complexity of signature. The zero-crossing rate of the recorded signal is used to estimate the corner frequency, which is the dominant frequency in the velocity domain of record. The high-frequency fall-off can be estimated in the time-frequency spectrogram by finding the frequency below which 75% of the energy of the spectrum is produced. The complexity of the spectrum of the recorded signal is finally represented by a second-order polynomial coefficient fitting the spectrum and capturing the slope of the source spectra. Also, we use the spectral flatness to quantify the noise properties. We validate the proposed procedure to synthetic data generated by the stochastic simulation method. We finally apply the method to real data sets to detect the seismic precursors for the Nuugaatsiaq landslide. We separate the earthquake event and precursory signals because of different corner frequencies and show that the precursory signals started for hours before the main landslide.</p><p> </p>

Classification of Stereo-EEG Contacts in White Matter vs. Gray Matter Using Recorded Activity

For epileptic patients requiring resective surgery, a modality called stereo-electroencephalography (SEEG) may be used to monitor the patient's brain signals to help identify epileptogenic regions that generate and propagate seizures. SEEG involves the insertion of multiple depth electrodes into the patient's brain, each with 10 or more recording contacts along its length. However, a significant fraction (≈ 30% or more) of the contacts typically reside in white matter or other areas of the brain which can not be epileptogenic themselves. Thus, an important step in the analysis of SEEG recordings is distinguishing between electrode contacts which reside in gray matter vs. those that do not. MRI images overlaid with CT scans are currently used for this task, but they take significant amounts of time to manually annotate, and even then it may be difficult to determine the status of some contacts. In this paper we present a fast, automated method for classifying contacts in gray vs. white matter based only on the recorded signal and relative contact depth. We observe that bipolar referenced contacts in white matter have less power in all frequencies below 150 Hz than contacts in gray matter, which we use in a Bayesian classifier to attain an average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.85 ± 0.079 (SD) across 29 patients. Because our method gives a probability for each contact rather than a hard labeling, and uses a feature of the recorded signal that has direct clinical relevance, it can be useful to supplement decision-making on difficult to classify contacts or as a rapid, first-pass filter when choosing subsets of contacts from which to save recordings.

The influence the horizontal structure of the forest on the passing the L1 range of navigation satellites signals

Experimental data on the passing of signals from navigation satellites of the L1 range through forest plantations with an anisotropic horizontal tree arrangement structure are presented. A feature of the studied environment is an irregular distance between trees in rows and a constant distance between rows. Signals were recorded by an antenna located inside the forest at heights of 0.5 and 10 meters. Based on the results of processing the amplitude-time dependences of the recorded signal by means of fast Fourier transform, qualitative differences were revealed depending on the orientation of the probe signal path in the forest stand.

Sedproxy: a forward model for sediment-archived climate proxies

Climate reconstructions based on proxy records recovered from marine sediments, such as alkenone records or geochemical parameters measured on foraminifera, play an important role in our understanding of the climate system. They provide information about the state of the ocean ranging back hundreds to millions of years and form the backbone of paleo-oceanography. However, there are many sources of uncertainty associated with the signal recovered from sediment-archived proxies. These include seasonal or depth-habitat biases in the recorded signal; a frequency-dependent reduction in the amplitude of the recorded signal due to bioturbation of the sediment; aliasing of high-frequency climate variation onto a nominally annual, decadal, or centennial resolution signal; and additional sample processing and measurement error introduced when the proxy signal is recovered. Here we present a forward model for sediment-archived proxies that jointly models the above processes so that the magnitude of their separate and combined effects can be investigated. Applications include the interpretation and analysis of uncertainty in existing proxy records, parameter sensitivity analysis to optimize future studies, and the generation of pseudo-proxy records that can be used to test reconstruction methods. We provide examples, such as the simulation of individual foraminifera records, that demonstrate the usefulness of the forward model for paleoclimate studies. The model is implemented as an open-source R package, sedproxy, to which we welcome collaborative contributions. We hope that use of sedproxy will contribute to a better understanding of both the limitations and potential of marine sediment proxies to inform researchers about earth's past climate.

Sedproxy: a forward model for sediment archived climate proxies

Climate reconstructions based on proxy records recovered from marine sediments, such as alkenone records or geochemical parameters measured on foraminifera, play an important role in our understanding of the climate system. They provide information about the state of the ocean ranging back hundreds to millions of years and form the backbone of paleo-oceanography. However, there are many sources of uncertainty associated with the signal recovered from sediment archived proxies. These include seasonal or depth habitat biases in the recorded signal, a frequency dependent reduction in the amplitude of the recorded signal due to bioturbation of the sediment, aliasing of high frequency climate variation onto a nominally annual, decadal or centennial resolution signal, and additional sample processing and measurement error introduced when the proxy signal is recovered. Here we present a forward model for sediment archived proxies that jointly models the above processes, so that the magnitude of their separate and combined effects can be investigated. Applications include the interpretation and analysis of uncertainty in existing proxy records, parameter sensitivity analysis to optimize future studies, and the generation of pseudo-proxy records that can be used to test reconstruction methods. We provide examples, such as the simulation of individual foraminifera records, that demonstrate the usefulness of the forward model for paleoclimate studies. The model is implemented as a user-friendly R package, sedproxy, the use of which we hope will contribute to a better understanding of both the limitations and potential of marine sediment proxies to inform about past climate.

On the patchiness of the individual pulse spectra at the very low radio frequencies

We have used sensitive LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) observations of PSR B0809+74 at 15–62 MHz to study the anomalously intensive pulses, first reported by Ulyanov et al. (2006) at 18–30 MHz. Similarly to Ulyanov et al., we found that the spectra of strong pulses consist of distinct bright patches. Moreover, these spectral patches were spotted to drift upwards in frequency over the course of several pulse sequences. We established that this drift is not pulsar-intrinsic, but is caused by the broadband ~20 second-long enhancements of recorded signal, which influenced the dispersed tracks of several pulses at once. We speculate on the cause of such enhancements (i.e. propagation or telescope-related) and the ramifications they bring to the single-pulse studies at the very low radio frequencies. Depending on the origin, the phenomenon may also affect the analysis of highly dispersed single pulses at higher radio frequencies, e.g. Fast Radio Bursts.