A fast and accurate iris segmentation method using an LoG filter and its zero-crossings

This paper presents a hybrid approach to achieve iris localization based on a Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) filter, region growing, and zero-crossings of the LoG filter. In the proposed method, an LoG filter with region growing is used to detect the pupil region. Subsequently, zero-crossings of the LoG filter are used to accurately mark the inner and outer circular boundaries. The use of LoG based blob detection along with zero-crossings makes the inner and outer circle detection fast and robust. The proposed method has been tested on three public databases: MMU version 1.0, CASIA-IrisV1 and CASIA-IrisV3- Lamp. The experimental results demonstrate the segmentation accuracy of the proposed method. The robustness of the proposed method is also validated in the presence of noise, such as eyelashes, a reflection of the pupil, Poisson, Gaussian, speckle and salt-and-pepper noise. The comparison with well-known methods demonstrates the superior performance of the proposed method's accuracy and speed.

Automatic Diagnosis of Schizophrenia using EEG Signals and CNN-LSTM Models

Schizophrenia (SZ) is a mental disorder whereby due to the secretion of specific chemicals in the brain, the function of some brain regions is out of balance, leading to the lack of coordination between thoughts, actions, and emotions. This study provides various intelligent Deep Learning (DL)-based methods for automated SZ diagnosis via EEG signals. The obtained results are compared with those of conventional intelligent methods. In order to implement the proposed methods, the dataset of the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology in Warsaw, Poland, has been used. First, EEG signals are divided into 25-seconds time frames and then were normalized by z-score or norm L2. In the classification step, two different approaches are considered for SZ diagnosis via EEG signals. In this step, the classification of EEG signals is first carried out by conventional DL methods, e.g., KNN, DT, SVM, Bayes, bagging, RF, and ET. Various proposed DL models, including LSTMs, 1D-CNNs, and 1D-CNN-LSTMs, are used in the following. In this step, the DL models were implemented and compared with different activation functions. Among the proposed DL models, the CNN-LSTM architecture has had the best performance. In this architecture, the ReLU activation function and the z-score and L2 combined normalization are used. The proposed CNN-LSTM model has achieved an accuracy percentage of 99.25\%, better than the results of most former studies in this field. It is worth mentioning that in order to perform all simulations, the k-fold cross-validation method with k=5 has been used.

Applications of Epileptic Seizures Detection in Neuroimaging Modalities Using Deep Learning Techniques: Methods, Challenges, and Future Works

Epileptic seizures are a type of neurological disorder that affect many people worldwide. Specialist physicians and neurologists take advantage of structural and functional neuroimaging modalities to diagnose various types of epileptic seizures. Neuroimaging modalities assist specialist physicians considerably in analyzing brain tissue and the changes made in it. One method to accelerate the accurate and fast diagnosis of epileptic seizures is to employ computer aided diagnosis systems (CADS) based on artificial intelligence (AI) and functional and structural neuroimaging modalities. AI encompasses a variety of areas, and one of its branches is deep learning (DL). Not long ago, and before the rise of DL algorithms, feature extraction was an essential part of every conventional machine learning method, yet handcrafting features limit these models' performances to the knowledge of system designers. DL methods resolved this issue entirely by automating the feature extraction and classification process; applications of these methods in many fields of medicine, such as the diagnosis of epileptic seizures, have made notable improvements. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of the types of DL methods exploited to diagnose epileptic seizures from various neuroimaging modalities has been studied. Additionally, rehabilitation systems and cloud computing in epileptic seizures diagnosis applications have been exactly investigated using various modalities.