Faezeh Marzbanrad

• PhD
• Lecturer at Monash University (Australia)

An automated method to assess the fetal physiological development is introduced which uses the component intervals between fetal cardiac valve timings and the Q-wave of fetal electrocardiogram (fECG). These intervals were estimated automatically from one-dimensional Doppler Ultrasound and noninvasive fECG. We hypothesize that the fetal growth can b...

Evidence of the short term relationship between maternal and fetal heart rates has been found in previous studies. However there is still limited knowledge about underlying mechanisms and patterns of the coupling throughout gestation. In this study, Transfer Entropy (TE) was used to quantify directed interactions between maternal and fetal heart ra...

Electromechanical coupling of the fetal heart can be evaluated non-invasively using Doppler Ultrasound (DUS) signal and fetal electrocardiography (fECG). In this study, an efficient model is proposed using K-means clustering and hybrid SVMHMM modeling techniques. Opening and closing of the cardiac valves were detected from peaks in the high frequen...

In this paper a new noninvasive method is proposed for automated estimation of fetal cardiac intervals from Doppler Ultrasound (DUS) signal. This method is based on a novel combination of Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) and hybrid support vector machines - Hidden Markov Models (SVM/HMM). EMD was used for feature extraction by decomposing the DUS...

Angiotensin Converting Enzyme (ACE) polymorphism has been shown to be important in hypertension progression and also in diabetes complications, especially associated with heart disease. Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is an established measure for classification of autonomic function regulating heart rate, based on the inter-beat interval time series...

Aim: This study evaluates the technical feasibility of Infafeed, a novel noninvasive prototype for measuring ingested milk volumes in neonates, offering an objective assessment to support breastfeeding. Materials and methods: A single-center pilot study was conducted. Twenty-four newborn infants (mean gestational age: 37 ± 1 weeks, birth weight: 2....

Congenital heart disease (CHD) is a critical condition that demands early detection, particularly in infancy and childhood. This study presents a deep learning model designed to detect CHD using phonocardiogram (PCG) signals, with a focus on its application in global health. We evaluated our model on several datasets, including the primary dataset...

Accurate detection of hypoxia during fetal monitoring is critical for timely intervention and prevention of brain injury. This study investigated hypoxia detection in fetal sheep by developing a classifier to differentiate between baseline, during acute hypoxia (umbilical cord occlusion; UCO), and post-hypoxia recovery (post-UCO), using physiologic...

Accurate detection of hypoxia during fetal monitoring is critical for timely intervention and prevention of brain injury. This study investigated hypoxia detection in fetal sheep by developing a classifier to differentiate between baseline, during acute hypoxia (umbilical cord occlusion; UCO), and post-hypoxia recovery (post-UCO), using physiologic...

Goal: Auscultation for neonates is a simple and non-invasive method of diagnosing cardiovascular and respiratory disease. However, obtaining high-quality chest sounds containing only heart or lung sounds is non-trivial. Hence, this study introduces a new deep-learning model named NeoSSNet and evaluates its performance in neonatal chest sound separa...

Monitoring driver drowsiness is a crucial aspect of ensuring road safety. Many studies have explored a variety of physiological signals and behavioural monitoring of drivers using video, or a combination of these approaches. In this paper, we investigate and optimise the effectiveness of various modalities to monitor drowsiness. We developed a phys...

Aim: To assess the evidence for the use of digital stethoscopes in neonates and evaluate whether they are effective, appropriate, and advantageous for neonatal auscultation. Methods: A systematic review and narrative synthesis of studies published between January 1, 1990 and May 29, 2023 was conducted following searches of MEDLINE, Embase, PubMed,...

Introduction Assessment of bowel health in ill preterm infants is essential to prevent and diagnose early potentially life-threatening intestinal conditions such as necrotizing enterocolitis. Auscultation of bowel sounds helps assess peristalsis and is an essential component of this assessment. Aim We aim to compare conventional bowel sound auscul...

With the rise of deep learning algorithms nowadays, scene image representation methods have achieved a significant performance boost, particularly in accuracy, in classification. However, the performance is still limited because the scene images are mostly complex having higher intra-class dissimilarity and inter-class similarity problems. To deal...

This paper explores automated face and facial landmark detection of neonates, which is an important first step in many video-based neonatal health applications, such as vital sign estimation, pain assessment, sleep-wake classification, and jaundice detection. Utilising three publicly available datasets of neonates in the clinical environment, 366 i...

With the development of Artificial Intelligence techniques, smart health monitoring is becoming more popular. In this study, we investigate the trend of wearable sensors being adopted and developed in neonatal cardiorespiratory monitoring. We performed a search of papers published from the year 2000 onwards. We then reviewed the advances in sensor...

Background: With the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, smart health monitoring, particularly neonatal cardiorespiratory monitoring with wearable devices, is becoming more popular. To this end, it is crucial to investigate the trend of AI and wearable sensors being developed in this domain. Methods: We performed a review of...

For the care of neonatal infants, abdominal auscultation is considered a safe, convenient, and inexpensive method to monitor bowel conditions. With the help of early automated detection of bowel dysfunction, neonatologists could create a diagnosis plan for early intervention. In this paper, a novel technique is proposed for automated peristalsis so...

Stethoscope-recorded chest sounds provide the opportunity for remote cardio-respiratory health monitoring of neonates. However, reliable monitoring requires high-quality heart and lung sounds. This paper presents novel artificial intelligence-based Non-negative Matrix Factorisation (NMF) and Non-negative Matrix Co-Factorisation (NMCF) methods for n...

Neonatal respiratory distress is a common condition that if left untreated, can lead to short- and long-term complications. This paper investigates the usage of digital stethoscope recorded chest sounds taken within 1 min post-delivery, to enable early detection and prediction of neonatal respiratory distress. Fifty-one term newborns were included...

With the rise of deep learning algorithms nowadays, scene image representation methods on big data (e.g., SUN-397) have achieved a significant performance boost in classification. However, the performance is still limited because the scene images are mostly complex in nature having higher intra-class dissimilarity and inter-class similarity problem...

Chest sound— as the first and most commonly available vital signal for newborns— contains affluent information about their cardiac and respiratory health. However, neonatal lung sound auscultation is currently challenging and often unreliable due to the noise and interference, particularly for preterm infants. The noise often overlaps with the hear...

Blood pressure (BP) is a cardiovascular parameter which exhibits significant variability. Whilst continuous BP monitoring would be of significant clinical utility. This is particularly challenging outside the hospital environment. New wearable cuff-based and cuffless BP monitoring technologies provide some capacity, however they have a number of li...

Neonatal respiratory distress is a common condition that if left untreated, can lead to short- and long-term complications. This paper investigates the usage of digital stethoscope recorded chest sounds taken within 1min post-delivery, to enable early detection and prediction of neonatal respiratory distress. Fifty-one term newborns were included i...

Stethoscope-recorded chest sounds provide the opportunity for remote cardio-respiratory health monitoring of neonates. However, reliable monitoring requires high-quality heart and lung sounds. This paper presents novel Non-negative Matrix Factorisation (NMF) and Non-negative Matrix Co-Factorisation (NMCF) methods for neonatal chest sound separation...

In this study, a new method is proposed to assess heart and lung signal quality objectively and automatically on a 5-level scale in real-time, and to assess the effect of signal quality on vital sign estimation. A total of 207 10 s long chest sounds were taken from 119 preterm and full-term babies. Thirty of the recordings from ten subjects were ob...

Abdominal auscultation is a convenient, safe and inexpensive method to assess bowel conditions, which is essential in neonatal care. It helps early detection of neonatal bowel dysfunctions and allows timely intervention. This paper presents a neonatal bowel sound detection method to assist the auscultation. Specifically, a Convolutional Neural Netw...

Major depressive disorder (MDD) has been considered a severe and common ailment with effects on functional frailty, while its clear manifestations are shrouded in mystery. Hence, manual detection of MDD is a challenging and subjective task. Although Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals have shown promise in aiding diagnosis, further enhancement is re...

Driver drowsiness has caused a large number of serious injuries and deaths on public roads and incurred billions of taxpayer dollars in costs. Hence, monitoring of drowsiness is critical to reduce this burden on society. This paper surveys the broad range of solutions proposed to address the challenges of driver drowsiness, and identifies the key s...

Chest X-ray (CXR) images have been one of the important diagnosis tools used in the COVID-19 disease diagnosis. Deep learning (DL)-based methods have been used heavily to analyze these images. Compared to other DL-based methods, the bag of deep visual words-based method (BoDVW) proposed recently is shown to be a prominent representation of CXR imag...

Obtaining high quality heart and lung sounds enables clinicians to accurately assess a newborns cardio-respiratory health and provide timely care. However, noisy chest sound recordings are common, hindering timely and accurate assessment. A new Non-negative Matrix Co-Factorisation based approach is proposed to separate noisy chest sound recordings...

Digital stethoscopes in combination with telehealth allow chest sounds to be easily collected and transmitted for remote monitoring and diagnosis. Chest sounds contain important information about a newborn's cardio-respiratory health. However, low-quality recordings complicate the remote monitoring and diagnosis. In this study, a new method is prop...

Driver drowsiness has caused a large number of serious injuries and deaths on public roads and incurred billions of taxpayer dollars in costs. Hence, monitoring of drowsiness is critical to reduce this burden on society. This paper surveys the broad range of solutions proposed to address the challenges of driver drowsiness, and identifies the key s...

Obtaining high-quality heart and lung sounds enables clinicians to accurately assess a newborn's cardio-respiratory health and provide timely care. However, noisy chest sound recordings are common, hindering timely and accurate assessment. A new Non-negative Matrix Co-Factorisation-based approach is proposed to separate noisy chest sound recordings...

Abdominal auscultation is a convenient, safe and inexpensive method to assess bowel conditions, which is essential in neonatal care. It helps early detection of neonatal bowel dysfunctions and allows timely intervention. This paper presents a neonatal bowel sound detection method to assist the auscultation. Specifically, a Convolutional Neural Netw...

Breathing Rate (BR) is a key physiological parameter measured in a wide range of clinical settings. However, it is still widely measured manually. In this paper, a novel framework is proposed to estimate the BR from an electrocardiogram (ECG), a photoplethysmogram (PPG), or a blood pressure (BP) signal. The framework uses Empirical Mode Decompositi...

Introduction Fetal myocardial performance indices are applied to assess aspects of systolic and diastolic function in developing fetal heart. The aim of this study was to determine normal values of Tei Index (TI) and modified TI (KI) for systolic and diastolic performance in early (<30 weeks), Mid (30-35 weeks) and late (36-41 weeks) relating to bo...

With advances in digital stethoscopes, internet of things, signal processing and machine learning, chest sounds can be easily collected and transmitted to the cloud for remote monitoring and diagnosis. However, low quality of recordings complicates remote monitoring and diagnosis, particularly for neonatal care. This paper proposes a new method to...

The complex nature of physiological systems where multiple organs interact to form a network is complicated by direct and indirect interactions, with varying strength and direction of influence. This study proposes a novel framework which quantifies directional and pairwise couplings, while controlling for the effect of indirect interactions. Simul...

In-utero progress of fetal development is normally assessed through manual measurements taken from ultrasound images, requiring relatively expensive equipment and well-trained personnel. Such monitoring is therefore unavailable in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where most of the perinatal mortality and morbidity exists. The work presente...

Objective: One dimensional (1D) Doppler ultrasound (DUS) is commonly used for fetal health assessment, during both regular prenatal visits and labor. It is used in preference to ECG and other modalities because of its simplicity and cost. To date, all analysis of such data has been confined to a smoothed, windowed heart rate estimation derived fro...

Background: The digital stethoscope (DS) and computerised breath sound analysis has been used to assess normal and abnormal breath sounds in children 1. This technique involves using recordings to obtain power spectrum profiles using Fourier transform , providing information in addition to what is available to the human ear 2. The neonatal populati...

Newborn transition is a phase of complex change involving lung fluid clearance and lung aeration. We aimed to use a digital stethoscope (DS) to assess the change in breath sound characteristics over the first 2 h of life and its relationship to mode of delivery. A commercially available DS was used to record breath sounds of term newborns at 1-min...

Objective: Low birth weight is one of the leading contributors to global perinatal deaths. Detecting this problem close to birth enables the initiation of early intervention, thus reducing the long-term impact on the fetus. However, in low-and middle-income countries, sometimes newborns are weighted days or months after birth, thus challenging the...

Background There is no published literature regarding the use of the digital stethoscope (DS) and computerized breath sound analysis in neonates, despite neonates experiencing a high burden of respiratory disease. We aimed to determine if the DS could be used to study breath sounds of term and preterm neonates without respiratory disease, and detec...

Aim: Respiratory distress syndrome is a common condition among preterm neonates and . Assessing lung aeration assists in diagnosing the disease and helping to guide and monitor treatment. We aimed to identify and analyse the tools available to assess lung aeration in neonates with respiratory distress syndrome. Methods: A systematic review and n...

Sensitive, specific, yet multifunctional tattoo‐like electronics are ideal wearable systems for “any time, any where” health monitoring because they can virtually become parts of the human skin, offering a burdenless “unfeelable” wearing experience. A skin‐like, multifunctional electronic tattoo made entirely from gold using a standing enokitake‐mu...

Objective: Open research on fetal heart rate (FHR) estimation is relatively rare, and evidence for the utility of metrics derived from Doppler ultrasound devices has historically remained hidden in the proprietary documentation of commercial entities, thereby inhibiting its assessment and improvement. Nevertheless, recent studies have attempted to...

https://physionet.org/physiotools/dsqi/

Aim To explore, synthesise and discuss currently available digital stethoscopes (DS) and the evidence for their use in paediatric medicine. Methods Systematic review and narrative synthesis of digital stethoscope use in paediatrics following searches of OVID Medline, Embase, Scopus, PubMed and Google Scholar databases. Results Six digital stethos...

Objective: The advent of telehealth applications and remote patient monitoring has led to an increasing need for continuous signal quality monitoring to ensure high diagnostic accuracy of the recordings. Cardiovascular diseases often manifest electrophysiological anomalies, therefore the electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the most used signals for...

One-dimensional Doppler ultrasound (1D-DUS) provides a low-cost and simple method for acquiring a rich signal for use in cardiovascular screening. However, despite the use of 1D-DUS in cardiotocography (CTG) for decades, there are still challenges that limit the effectiveness of its users in reducing fetal and neonatal morbidities and mortalities....

The scalability of medical technology in low resource settings requires a higher level of usability and clear decision support compared to conventional devices, since users often have very limited training. In particular, it is important to provide users with real time feedback on data quality during the patient information acquisition in a manner...

One dimensional Doppler Ultrasound (DUS) is a low cost method for fetal auscultation. However, accuracy of any metrics derived from the DUS signals depends on their quality, which relies heavily on operator skills. In low resource settings, where skill levels are sparse, it is important for the device to provide real time signal quality feedback to...

Maternal psycho-physiological activities affect the fetal heart rate and heart rate variability. However, directions and patterns of maternal and fetal heartbeat coupling are still poorly understood. The aim of this study was to quantify the direction of short-term maternal–fetal cardiac coupling in early, mid and late gestation fetuses by using pa...

A new automated method for estimation of the gestational age is presented in this paper based on the intervals between fetal cardiac valve timings and the Q-wave of fetal electrocardiogram (fECG). The intervals were estimated automatically from one-dimensional Doppler Ultrasound and noninvasive fECG. Among the intervals, Isovolumic Contraction Time...

Doppler-derived myocardial performance index are used to assess aspects of systolic and diastolic function in adult as well as fetal heart. The Tei Index (TI) is a useful and non-invasive tool. The aim of this study was to determine normal values of fetal left ventricular (LV) TI in early (16-32 weeks) and late trimester (35-41 weeks) fetuses and t...

This code provides the synchrogram and the phase synchronization parameters to evaluate the coupling of two signals, accompanied by an example to test it on two artificial signals. [Q. Wang, A. H. Khandoker, F. Marzbanrad, et al., ”Investigating the beat by beat phase synchronization between maternal and fetal heart rates”. Engineering in Medicine...

One dimensional Doppler Ultrasound (DUS) is a commonly applied technique for fetal heart rate monitoring, but it can also be used to identify the timings of fetal cardiac valve motion. These timings are required to estimate the fetal cardiac intervals, which are fundamental and clinically significant markers of fetal development and well-being. Sev...

Although evidence of the short term relationship between maternal and fetal heart rates has been found in previous model-based studies, knowledge about the mechanism and patterns of the coupling during gestation is still limited. In this study, a model-free method based on Transfer Entropy (TE) was applied to quantify the maternal-fetal heart rate...

Marzban Rad, F.; Masnadi-Shirazi, M.A., "A novel and fast blind source separation algorithm for convolutive environment," IECON 2010 - 36th Annual Conference on IEEE Industrial Electronics Society , vol., no., pp.1047,1051, 7-10 Nov. 2010 doi: 10.1109/IECON.2010.5675513 keywords: {blind source separation;channel estimation;convolution;independent c...

Electromechanical coupling of the fetal heart can be evaluated using the intervals between the onset of the QRS complex of the fetal electrocardiogram (fECG) and opening and closing of the cardiac valves. An automated method was proposed in our previous study to estimate these intervals from Doppler Ultrasound (DUS) signal and fECG for normal fetus...

Isovolumic Contraction Time (ICT) is the interval from mitral closing to aorta opening. Fetal ICT can be noninvasively measured from Doppler Ultrasound (DUS) signal. Automated identification of opening and closing of mitral and aortic valves from DUS signal was proposed in recent studies. Fetal electrocardiogram (fECG) has a crucial role as a refer...

Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is extensively used to investigate general Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) func-tion and is affected by many factors including age, gender, pathology such as diabetes and genetic polymorphisms. One of these genetic polymorphisms is the Angiotensin Converting Enzyme (ACE) polymorphism corresponding to insertion (I) or del...

Fetal cardiac assessment techniques are aimed to identify fetuses at risk of intrauterine compromise or death. Evaluation of the electromechanical coupling as a fundamental part of the fetal heart physiology, provides valuable information about the fetal wellbeing during pregnancy. It is based on the opening and closing time of the cardiac valves a...

Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is extensively used to investigate general Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) function and is affected by many factors including age, gender, pathology such as diabetes and genetic polymorphisms. One of these genetic polymorphisms is the Angiotensin Converting Enzyme (ACE) polymorphism corresponding to insertion (I) or dele...

The development of the fetal cardiovascular system plays a crucial role in fetal health. The evolution of the relationship between fetal and maternal cardiac systems during fetal maturation is a characterizing feature for fetal cardiac development. This paper aims to evaluate this relationship by investigating the beat-to-beat synchronization betwe...

In this paper a new noninvasive method is proposed for automated estimation of opening and closure timings of fetal cardiac valves. These timings are obtained from Doppler Ultrasound (DUS) signal and fetal electrocardiogram (fECG) as a reference. Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) is first applied to the DUS signal to decompose it into different co...

In this paper a new noninvasive method is proposed for automated estimation of fetal cardiac intervals from Doppler Ultrasound (DUS) signal and fetal electrocardiogram (fECG) as a reference. The proposed method is based on a combination of Wavelet analysis and hybrid Support Vector Machines- Hidden Markov Models (SVM/HMM). This method provides auto...

Heart Rate Variability (HRV) has been extensively investigated for characterizing the autonomic nervous system (ANS) in controlling heart rate. Since ectopic beats, artefacts and noise of the ECG can affect the estimation of HRV features, pre-processing of the RR tachogram can improve the accuracy of HRV analysis and discriminatory power. This pape...

( Matlab codes: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271696747_Matlab_codes?ev=prf_pub ) In this paper a novel and fast algorithm for the blind source separation in convolutive media is introduced. This method estimates multiple independent source signals, using only their set of received convolutive mixtures. The number of sources and the de...