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Introduction
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Publications
Publications (237)
Introduction: This study aimed to develop and validate an efficient eye-tracking algorithm suitable for the analysis of images captured in the visible-light spectrum using a smartphone camera. Methods: The investigation primarily focused on comparing two algorithms, which were named CHT_TM and CHT_ACM, abbreviated from the core functions: Circular...
COVID-19, which is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has caused millions of cases and fatalities around the world. It is clearer and clearer how ex-COVID-19 patients endure neurological symptoms, such as headaches and cognitive impairment, in addition to respiratory problems. Long COVID refers to symptoms that continue after the acute phase, impactin...
Objective: This descriptive systematic review aimed to assess in the available literature on the current application and overall performance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models in the diagnosis and classification of Rotator Cuff Tears (RCTs) using MRIs. Methods: The systematic review was performed by two of the authors from 2020 to November 2024...
This chapter explores the theme of sustainability through a re-evaluation of the Sustainable Development Goals, focusing on prosperity and its essential role in achieving true sustainability. It examines the sustainability of healthcare systems through the lens of prosperity, highlighting how current norms often undervalue prosperity and poverty. G...
Oxygen concentrators (OCs) are essential medical devices providing oxygen in various settings, especially low-resource settings (LRSs). Despite their adaptability and cost-effectiveness, challenges arise in such environments due to factors like dust, temperature, and humidity, leading to premature OC failure. While efforts have been made to address...
This project aimed to develop and validate an efficient eye tracking algorithm suitable for the analysis of images captured in the visible light spectrum using a smartphone camera. In particular, the investigation primarily focused on comparing two algorithms, which were named CHT_TM and CHT_ACM, abbreviated from the core functions: Circular Hough...
Background: Biomedical natural language processing (NLP) increasingly relies on large language models and extensive datasets, presenting significant computational challenges. Methods: We propose Blue5, a multi-task model based on SciFive that incorporates instance selection (IS) to enable efficient, multi-task learning (MTL) on biomedical data. We...
Artificial intelligence is increasingly showing potential in assisting physicians with disease diagnosis due to its improved predicting performance. In addition to achieving high performance, these systems must also be efficient and explainable. In this study, we propose a novel Feature Distillation method to transfer knowledge and explainability b...
Background
Oxygen therapy is critical and vital treatment for hypoxemia and respiratory distress, however, access to reliable oxygen systems remains limited in SSA. Despite WHO initiatives that distributed over 30,000 OC oxygen concentrators worldwide, SSA faces significant challenges related to their maintenance and use, due to harsh environmental...
In this comprehensive study, we employed a versatile approach to tackle the prediction challenges associated with atrial fibrillation (AF) and cardiovascular events (CE). Exploiting the Gaussian copula synthesizer technique for data generation, we created high-quality synthetic data to overcome the limitations posed by scarce patient records. Heart...
Naxos disease is a rare autosomal recessive condition combining arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy, woolly hair, and palmoplantar keratoderma. The first identified causative variant was in the gene encoding the desmosomal protein plakoglobin. Naxos disease exhibits fibro-fatty myocardial replacement with immunohistological abnormalitie...
This chapter draws comparisons between significant EU legal frameworks, such as the Medical Device Regulations and the General Data Protection Regulation, and the socio-economic challenges that Europeans have faced historically. It uses these comparisons to shed light on the motivations behind the policymakers’ decisions regarding upcoming regulati...
Purpose
The objective of this study is to train and test machine‐learning (ML) models to automatically classify shoulder rehabilitation exercises.
Methods
The cohort included both healthy and patients with rotator‐cuff (RC) tears. All participants performed six shoulder rehabilitation exercises, following guidelines developed by the American Socie...
Shoulder rehabilitation is considered one of the most effective treatments for restoring functional abilities, reducing shoulder pain, and enabling the leading of an active life, improving mobility, strength, and endurance. However, the burdens of travel and time may prevent patients from taking part in such rehabilitation programs. The increased a...
Post-partum haemorrhage is among the main causes of (preventable) mortality for women in low-resource settings (LRSs), where, in 2017, the mortality ratio was 462 out of every 100 000 live births, over 10 times higher than for high-resource settings. There are different treatments available for post-partum haemorrhage. The intrauterine balloon tamp...
Background: Pandemic management and preparedness are more needed than ever before and there is widespread governmental interest in learning from the COVID-19 pandemic in order to ensure the availability of evidence-based Infection Prevention and Control measures. Contact tracing is integral to Infection Prevention and Control, facilitating breaks i...
Introduction
Prostate cancer (PCa) is one of the prevailing forms of cancer among men. At present, multiparametric MRI is the imaging method for localizing tumors and staging cancer. Radiomics plays a key role and hold potential for PCa detection, reducing the need for unnecessary biopsies, characterizing tumor aggression, and overseeing PCa recurr...
Shoulder pain represents the most frequently reported musculoskeletal disorder, often leading to significant functional impairment and pain, impacting quality of life. Home-based rehabilitation programs offer a more accessible and convenient solution for an effective shoulder disorder treatment, addressing logistical and financial constraints assoc...
This manuscript presents a parallel among important EU legal frameworks, such as the Medical Device Regulations and General Data Protection Regulation and economic-historical challenges faced by European citizens. This parallel offers a prospective for understanding the direction taken by policymakers for forthcoming regulations, such as the Europe...
Background
Healthy lifestyle interventions have a positive impact on multiple disease trajectories, including cancer-related outcomes. Specifically, appropriate habitual physical activity, adequate sleep, and a regular wholesome diet are of paramount importance for the wellness and supportive care of survivors of cancer. Mobile health (mHealth) app...
Purpose
From previous studies, we had observed that the number of biomedical engineers and technicians (BMETs) skilled in the maintenance of medical devices (MDs) were limited in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and that a likely parallelism existed between BME maintenance-related tasks and house chores mainly carried out by women in daily life. Our object...
The use of AI in healthcare has sparked much debate among philosophers, ethicists, regulators and policymakers who raised concerns about the implications of such technologies. The presented scoping review captures the progression of the ethical and legal debate and the proposed ethical frameworks available concerning the use of AI-based medical tec...
This paper examines the ethical and legal challenges encountered during the GATEKEEPER Project and how these challenges informed the development of a comprehensive framework for future Large-Scale Pilot (LSP) projects. GATEKEEPER is a LSP Project with 48 partners conducting 30 implementation studies across Europe with 50,000 target participants gro...
Background: Cancer is progressively becoming the most prevalent disease worldwide, accompanied by significantly increasing investments in research to improve its prevention, early detection, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment. Predictive analytics are showing promising performance when applied to these tasks, with recent reporting guidelines suppor...
The COVID-19 pandemic, a period of great turmoil, was coupled with the emergence of an “infodemic”, a state when the public was bombarded with vast amounts of unverified information from dubious sources that led to a chaotic information landscape. The excessive flow of messages to citizens, combined with the justified fear and uncertainty imposed b...
Real-time detection of glycaemic events is crucial in the effective management of type 1 diabetes, particularly in paediatric patients. Recent advances in wearable sensors and machine learning have allowed for the inference of glycaemic events based on non-invasive physiological signals such as electrocardiogram (ECG). However, existing approaches...
Human activity recognition (HAR) is an expanding research field for analyzing holistic wellbeing trajectory, frailty detection and prevention of critical situations. With the increased availability of wearables and novel machine learning methods, the automatic recognition of human activities is exploited by real-time signals via Deep Learning techn...
During the COVID-19 pandemic, social networks were flooded with overwhelming information. This study focused on the interaction between science and society as this took place via Twitter. State of the art algorithmic sentiment analysis was employed to examine the communication between pharmaceutical companies and the public, to analyze the profile...
Introduction
The International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering created a multidisciplinary working group to discuss assessments of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) applications in health care. Engineers, clinicians, and economists identified evidence generation as a critical topic. Heart failure (HF) was selecte...
This paper contributes to a better understanding of a system of pandemic knowledge exchanges. Therefore, three different case studies conducted in Germany, Greece, and Turkiye and executed in multiple countries were analyzed in the context of Mode 3 knowledge production and the Quintuple Helix system. While the Quintuple Helix system describes the...
Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) are playing increasingly important roles, permeating the field of medical devices (MDs). This rapid progress has not yet been matched by the Health Technology Assessment (HTA) process, which still needs to define a common methodology for assessing AI/ML-based MDs. To collect existing evidence fro...
BACKGROUND
Healthy lifestyle interventions have a positive impact on multiple disease trajectories, including cancer-related outcomes. Specifically, appropriate habitual physical activity, adequate sleep, and a regular wholesome diet are of paramount importance for the wellness and supportive care of survivors of cancer. Mobile health (mHealth) app...
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the scale of global unpreparedness to deal with the fast-arising needs of global health threats. This problem was coupled with a crisis of governance and presented in the context of globally hitting climate crisis and disasters. Although such a pandemic was predictable due to the known effects of human intervention...
Indoor air quality monitoring is vital for ensuring high-quality healthcare services and minimizing the presence of harmful pollutants and environmental factors that could potentially impact on the well-being of individuals in hospitals. To address this need, the authors developed the Transparent Robot (TR), an integrated sensorized platform design...
The well-being of students and staff directly affects their output and efficiency. This study presents the results of two focus groups conducted in 2022 within a two-phase project led by the Applied Biomedical and Signal Processing Intelligent e-Health Lab, School of Engineering at the University of Warwick, and British Telecom within “The Connecte...
Background:
The World Health Organization's strategy toward healthy aging fosters person-centered integrated care sustained by eHealth systems. However, there is a need for standardized frameworks or platforms accommodating and interconnecting multiple of these systems while ensuring secure, relevant, fair, trust-based data sharing and use. The H2...
With the advent of Artificial Intelligence for healthcare, data synthesis methods present crucial benefits in facilitating the fast development of AI models while protecting data subjects and bypassing the need to engage with the complexity of data sharing and processing agreements. Existing technologies focus on synthesising real-time physiologica...
Introduction
Hypoglycaemia is a harmful potential complication in people with type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) and can be exacerbated in patients receiving treatment, such as insulin therapies, by the very interventions aiming to achieve optimal blood glucose levels. Symptoms can vary greatly, including, but not limited to, trembling, palpitations,...
The ECG segmentation tool has been pivotal in determination of fidu-cial points of the ECG beat which can be used to determine the ECG parameters representing the ECG beat and short-term ECG signal. Most of existing studies suggest the filtering of the ECG signal followed by thresholding via rule-based approach. However, these approaches are highly...
Background:
Infection prevention and control (IPC) is essential to prevent nosocomial infections. This manuscript aims at investigating the current use and role of robots and smart environments on IPC systems in nosocomial settings METHODS: The systematic literature review was performed following the PRISMA statement. Literature was searched for a...
The wellbeing of students and staff directly affects their output and efficiency. This study presents the results of two focus groups conducted in 2022 within a two-phase project led by the Applied Biomedical and Signal Processing Intelligent e-Health Lab (ABSPIE), School of Engineering of the University of Warwick (UoW) and British Telecom within...
PurposePaediatric Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) patients are at greater risk for developing severe hypo and hyperglycaemic events due to poor glycaemic control. To reduce the risk of adverse events, patients need to achieve the best possible glycaemic management through frequent blood glucose monitoring with finger prick or Continuous Glucose Monitoring (C...
The prevalence and impact of balance impairments and falls in older adults have motivated several studies on the characterization of human balance. This study aimed to determine the ability of recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) measures to characterize balance control during quiet standing in young and older adults and to discriminate between...
Purpose
Hospital facilities and social life, along with the global economy, have been severely challenged by COVID-19 since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it a pandemic in March 2020. Since then, countless ordinary citizens, as well as healthcare workers, have contracted the virus by just coming into contact with infected surfaces. In...
The healthcare environment is made up of highly complicated interactions between many technologies, activities, and people. Ensuring a solid communication between them is vital to ease the healthcare management. Semantic ontologies are knowledge representation tools that implement abstractions to fully describe a given topic in terms of subjects an...
Introduction
An iterative, life-cycle approach to the evaluation of healthcare technologies requires that clinical and economic evidence is collected since the initial stages of diffusion. Nevertheless, early cost-effectiveness models are challenging mainly due to the difficulties in estimating model parameters and faithfully characterizing paramet...
This book chapter focuses on the state-of-the-art AI technologies in healthcare in low resource settings and presents a case study on the use of AI to detect pneumonia in LRS.
BACKGROUND
The World Health Organization’s strategy toward healthy aging fosters person-centered integrated care sustained by eHealth systems. However, there is a need for standardized frameworks or platforms accommodating and interconnecting multiple of these systems while ensuring secure, relevant, fair, trust-based data sharing and use. The H202...
Background
Regulatory frameworks surrounding medical devices (MDs) and medical locations are of utter importance for safeguarding patients and users, and for granting a universal access to healthcare.
Currently, as the main existing regulatory frameworks are drafted by high-income countries, they pretend to be general and applicable globally, but f...
This project aims to assess and analyse the perception and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Benin. The applied research methodology was interdisciplinary and combined field studies that used ethnographic and social research methods with coding and data analysis, leading to theoretical dilemmas, which were analysed from the viewpoint of bioethical...
Target 3.4 of the third Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly proposes to reduce premature mortality from non-communicable diseases (NCDs) by one-third. Epidemiological data presented by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2016 show that out of a total of 57 million deaths worldwide, approximately 41 mill...
Information and communication technologies (ICT) such as smart devices, the Internet of Things and wireless sensor networks are gradually being introduced into the health system for early diagnosis and management of certain diseases. The state of the art of the use of these technologies in mental health identified 37 articles published in indexed h...
Introduction
This article aims at investigating social engagement in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic in low-resource settings (LRSs). In particular, it focuses on Benin (Sub-Saharan Africa), and reports the results of a field study that investigated the local people's acceptance of the vaccine and the tracking program.
Methods
This project...
Supporting the expansion of best practices in Biomedical Engineering (BME) can facilitate pathway toward the providing universal health coverage and more equitable and accessible healthcare technologies, especially in low- and middle-income (LMI) settings. These best practices can act as drivers of change and may involve scientific-technological is...
Payers and manufacturers can disagree on the appropriate level of evidence that is required for new medical devices, resulting in high societal costs due to decisions taken with sub‐optimal information. A cost‐effectiveness model of a hypothetical total artificial heart was built using data from the literature and the (simulated) results of a pivot...
Objective
To identify and assess the use of technologies, including mobile health technology, internet of things (IoT) devices and artificial intelligence (AI) in hypertension healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).
Design
Systematic review.
Data sources
Medline, Embase, Scopus and Web of Science.
Eligibility criteria
Studies addressing outcomes...
Featured Application
Applied Sciences—Special Issue on Semantic Interoperability and Applications in Healthcare, 2021.
Abstract
The World Health Organization and the American College of Sports Medicine have released guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behavior, as part of an effort to reduce inactivity worldwide. However, to date, there...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems using symptoms/signs to detect respiratory diseases may improve diagnosis especially in limited resource settings. Heterogeneity in such AI systems creates an ongoing need to analyse performance to inform future research. This systematic literature review aimed to investigate performance and reporting of diagnos...
This paper is aimed at addressing all the critical aspects linked to the implementation of intensive care ventilators in a pediatric setting, highlighting the most relevant technical features and describing the methodology to conduct health technology assessment (HTA) for supporting the decision-making process. Four ventilator models were included...
In March 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that humanity was entering a global pandemic phase. This unforeseen situation caught everyone unprepared and had a major impact on several professional categories that found themselves facing important ethical dilemmas. The article revolves around the category of biomedical and clinical en...
Face masks help to limit transmission of infectious diseases entering through the nose and mouth. Beyond reprocessing and decontamination, antimicrobial treatments could extend the lifetime of face masks whilst also further reducing the chance of disease transmission. Here, we review the efficacy of treatments pertaining antimicrobial properties to...
Electrocardiograms (ECGs) are widely used to detect cardiovascular disease (CVD). Deep learning is a topic of interest in healthcare, in which timely detection of ECG anomalies can play a vital role in patient monitoring. However, automatic detection of CVD via ECGs is a complex problem, where state-of-the-art performance is achieved typically by t...
Pneumonia is a leading cause of mortality in limited resource settings (LRS), which are common in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Accurate referrals can reduce the devastating impact of pneumonia, especially in LRS. Discriminating pneumonia from other respiratory conditions based only on symptoms is a major challenge. Machine learning has...
Background
The technological complexity and heterogeneity of intensive care ventilator models currently available on the market together with the heterogeneity in pediatric patients (0 to 18 years old), make the choice of the best machine for pediatric healthcare setting crucial.This paper is aimed at addressing all the critical aspects linked to t...
By using a case-study on a fall-prediction device for elderly patients with orthostatic hypotension we aim to demonstrate how the MAFEIP tool, developed as part of the European Innovation Programme on Active and Healthy Ageing (EIP on AHA), can be used to inform manufacturers on their product development based on a cost-effectiveness criterion. Sec...
Background: The Benin health system has challenges including: (i) the need to provide quality health care at low cost to a growing population, (ii) the reduction of patients' hospitalization time, (iii) and the optimization presence time of the nursing staff. Such challenges can be solved by remote monitoring of patients. Methodology: To achieve th...
The use of machine learning techniques in medicine has increased in recent years due to a rise in publicly available datasets. These techniques have been applied in high blood pressure studies following two approaches: hypertension stage classification based on clinical data and blood pressure estimation based on related physiological signals. This...
In the last decade, smartphone users grown from 2.8 billion worldwide in 2018 to 3.8 billion in 2021. This fact associates with greater ease of publishing and accessing fake news. This is a particularly concerning issue in a global crisis situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic. As stated by the WHO, this is a global health crisis and the spread of...
Background
To date (April 2021), medical device (MD) design approaches have failed to consider the contexts where MDs can be operationalised. Although most of the global population lives and is treated in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMCIs), over 80% of the MD market share is in high-resource settings, which set de facto standards that cannot...
This paper proposes a systematic literature review on ethics and CoviD-19, aiming to understand the impact and the perception of the pandemic during the first wave (January-June 2020) and the consequences one year later.
PubMed was systematically searched up May 2020 to identify studies that took into consideration various ethical issues that have...
The photopupillary reflex regulates the pupil reaction to changing light conditions. Being controlled by the autonomic nervous system, it is a proxy for brain trauma and for the conditions of patients in critical care. A prompt evaluation of brain traumas can save lives. With a simple penlight, skilled clinicians can do that, whereas less specializ...
A health technology assessment (HTA) is commonly defined as a multidisciplinary approach used to evaluate medical, social, economic, and ethical issues related to the use of a health technology in a systematic, transparent, unbiased, robust manner. To help inform HTA recommendations, the surveillance of social media platforms can provide important...
Background
Machine learning algorithms have been drawing attention at the joining of pathology and radiology in prostate cancer research. However, due to their algorithmic learning complexity and the variability of their architecture, there is an ongoing need to analyze their performance.
Objective
This study assesses the source of heterogeneity a...
Emerging technologies for physiological signals and data collection enable the monitoring of patient health and well-being in real-life settings. This requires novel methods and tools to compare the validity of this kind of information with that acquired in controlled environments using more costly and sophisticated technologies. In this paper, we...
In this paper, transcultural nursing is reviewed in light of bioethical issues arising from the interpretation of mental illness in some Western Sub-Saharan African communities. Four field studies were carried out by the authors of this paper in Sub-Saharan Africa (from 2016 to 2019), during which the traditional “treatment” of enchaining people co...
Background: Because of the health systems globalization, it is important to examine health systems organization in Africa, in terms of patient care, to highlight the failures and propose possible solutions. Objective: Modeling based on the Internet of Things (IoT) an Integrated Network for Monitoring Patient Data in West African Health Systems. Met...
Background
Following the Food and Drug Administration approval, robot-assisted colorectal surgery has gained more acceptance among surgeons. One of the open issues about robotic surgery is the economic sustainability. The aim of our study is to evaluate the economic sustainability of robotic as compared to laparoscopic right colectomy for the Itali...
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1007/s12553-020-00467-w.].