Estimation of pulse rate from ambulatory PPG using ensemble empirical mode decomposition and adaptive thresholding.

A new method for deriving pulse rate from PPG obtained from ambulatory patients is presented. The method employs Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition to identify the pulsatile component from noise-corrupted PPG, and then uses a set of physiologically-relevant rules followed by adaptive thresholding, in order to estimate the pulse rate in the presence of noise. The method was optimized and validated using 63 hours of data obtained from ambulatory hospital patients.

GPU technology as a platform for accelerating physiological systems modeling based on Laguerre-Volterra networks.

The use of a GPGPU programming paradigm (running CUDA-enabled algorithms on GPU cards) in biomedical engineering and biology-related applications have shown promising results. GPU acceleration can be used to speedup computation-intensive models, such as the mathematical modeling of biological systems, which often requires the use of nonlinear modeling approaches with a large number of free parameters. In this context, we developed a CUDA-enabled version of a model which implements a nonlinear identification approach that combines basis expansions and polynomial-type networks, termed Laguerre-Volterra networks and can be used in diverse biological applications.

Embedded Hardware-Efficient Real-Time Classification With Cascade Support Vector Machines.

Cascade support vector machines (SVMs) are optimized to efficiently handle problems, where the majority of the data belong to one of the two classes, such as image object classification, and hence can provide speedups over monolithic (single) SVM classifiers. However, SVM classification is a computationally demanding task and existing hardware architectures for SVMs only consider monolithic classifiers. This paper proposes the acceleration of cascade SVMs through a hybrid processing hardware architecture optimized for the cascade SVM classification flow, accompanied by a method to reduce the required hardware resources for its implementation, and a method to improve the classification speed utilizing cascade information to further discard data samples.

GPU technology as a platform for accelerating local complexity analysis of protein sequences.

The use of GPGPU programming paradigm (running CUDA-enabled algorithms on GPU cards) in Bioinformatics showed promising results [1]. As such a similar approach can be used to speedup other algorithms such as CAST, a popular tool used for masking low-complexity regions (LCRs) in protein sequences [2] with increased sensitivity. We developed and implemented a CUDA-enabled version (GPU_CAST) of the multi-threaded version of CAST software first presented in [3] and optimized in [4].