METHOD: In this study, we implement FWF as an energy minimization function to replace the standard gradient-descent method as minimization function in Chan-Vese segmentation technique. The proposed FWF is used to find the boundaries of an object by controlling the inside and outside values of the contour. In this study, the objective evaluation is used to distinguish the differences between the processed segmented images and ground truth using a set of statistical parameters; true positive, true negative, false positive, and false negative.
RESULTS: The FWF as a minimization of energy was successfully implemented on BRATS 2013 image dataset. The achieved overall average sensitivity score of the brain tumors segmentation was 94.8 ± 4.7%.
CONCLUSIONS: The results demonstrate that the proposed FWF method minimized the energy function more than the gradient-decent method that was used in the original three-dimensional active contour without edge (3DACWE) method.
METHODS: CFAE from several atrial sites, recorded for a duration of 16 s, were acquired from 10 patients with persistent and 9 patients with paroxysmal AF. These signals were appraised using non-overlapping windows of 1-, 2- and 4-s durations. The resulting data sets were analyzed with Recurrence Plots (RP) and Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA). The data was also quantified via entropy measures.
RESULTS: RQA exhibited unique plots for persistent versus paroxysmal AF. Similar patterns were observed to be repeated throughout the RPs. Trends were consistent for signal segments of 1 and 2 s as well as 4 s in duration. This was suggestive that the underlying signal generation process is also repetitive, and that repetitiveness can be detected even in 1-s sequences. The results also showed that most entropy metrics exhibited higher measurement values (closer to equilibrium) for persistent AF data. It was also found that Determinism (DET), Trapping Time (TT), and Modified Multiscale Entropy (MMSE), extracted from signals that were acquired from locations at the posterior atrial free wall, are highly discriminative of persistent versus paroxysmal AF data.
CONCLUSIONS: Short data sequences are sufficient to provide information to discern persistent versus paroxysmal AF data with a significant difference, and can be useful to detect repeating patterns of atrial activation.