Practicality meets precision: Wearable vest with integrated multi-channel PCG sensors for effective coronary artery disease pre-screening

The leading cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide is cardiovascular disease (CVD), with coronary artery disease (CAD) being the largest sub-category. Unfortunately, myocardial infarction or stroke can manifest as the first symptom of CAD, underscoring the crucial importance of early disease detection. Hence, there is a global need for a cost-effective, non-invasive, reliable, and easy-to-use system to pre-screen CAD. Previous studies have explored weak murmurs arising from CAD for classification using phonocardiogram (PCG) signals. However, these studies often involve tedious and inconvenient data collection methods, requiring precise subject preparation and environmental conditions. This study proposes using a novel data acquisition system (DAQS) designed for simplicity and convenience. The DAQS incorporates multi-channel PCG sensors into a wearable vest. The entire signal acquisition process can be completed in under two minutes, from fitting the vest to recording signals and removing it, requiring no specialist training. This exemplifies the potential for mass screening, which is impractical with current state-of-the-art protocols. Seven PCG signals are acquired, six from the chest and one from the subject's back, marking a novel approach. Our classification approach, which utilizes linear-frequency cepstral coefficients (LFCC) as features and employs a support vector machine (SVM) to distinguish between normal and CAD-affected heartbeats, outperformed alternative low-computational methods suitable for portable applications. Utilizing feature-level fusion, multiple channels are combined, and the optimal combination yields the highest subject-level accuracy and F1-score of 80.44% and 81.00%, respectively, representing a 7% improvement over the best-performing single channel. The proposed system's performance metrics have been demonstrated to be clinically significant.

A Bayesian 3D Multi-view Multi-object Tracking Filter

This paper proposes an online multi-camera multi-object tracker that only requires monocular detector training, independent of the multi-camera configurations, allowing seamless extension/deletion of cameras without (retraining) effort. The proposed algorithm has a linear complexity in the total number of detections across the cameras, and hence scales gracefully with the number of cameras. It operates in 3D world frame, and provides 3D trajectory estimates of the objects. The key innovation is a high fidelity yet tractable 3D occlusion model, amenable to optimal Bayesian multi-view multi-object filtering, which seamlessly integrates, into a single Bayesian recursion, the sub-tasks of track management, state estimation, clutter rejection, and occlusion/misdetection handling. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on the latest WILDTRACKS dataset, and demonstrated to work in very crowded scenes on a new dataset.