Combined Plasma DHA-Containing Phosphatidylcholine PCaa C38:6 and Tetradecanoyl-Carnitine as an Early Biomarker for Assessing the Mortality Risk among Sarcopenic Patients.

The coming of the hyper-aged society in Taiwan prompts us to investigate the relationship between the metabolic status of sarcopenic patients and their most adverse outcome-death. We studied the association between any plasma metabolites and the risk for mortality among older Taiwanese sarcopenic patients. We applied a targeted metabolomic approach to study the plasma metabolites of adults aged ≥65 years, and identified the metabolic signature predictive of the mortality of sarcopenic patients who died within a 5.

A VLSI Chip for the Abnormal Heart Beat Detection Using Convolutional Neural Network.

The heart is one of the human body's vital organs. An electrocardiogram (ECG) provides continuous tracings of the electrophysiological activity originated from heart, thus being widely used for a variety of diagnostic purposes. This study aims to design and realize an artificial intelligence (AI)-based abnormal heart beat detection with applications for early detection and timely treatment for heart diseases.

A VLSI Implementation of Independent Component Analysis for Biomedical Signal Separation Using CORDIC Engine.

This study aims to design and implement a very large scale integration (VLSI) chip of the extend InfoMax independent component analysis (ICA) algorithm which can separate the super-Gaussian source signals. In order to substantially reduce the circuit area, the proposed circuit utilizes the time sharing matrix multiplication array (MMA) to realize a series of matrix multiplication operations and employs the coordinate rotation digital computer (CORDIC) algorithm to calculate the hyperbolic functions sinh(θ) and cosh(θ) with the rotation of the hyperbolic coordinate system. Also, the rotation of the linear coordinate system of the CORDIC is adopted for the design of a divider used for obtaining the required function value of tanh(θ) simply by evaluating sinh(θ)/cosh(θ).

An optimal effective working height for hammering tasks.

Background: Hammering is a functional task in which the wrist generally follows a path of motion, however, previous studies paid relatively little attention to it.

Objective: The main objective of this study is to determine the optimal working height while using a straight-handled hammer to perform the hammering task.

Methods: Ten participants performed the hammering tasks on three different working heights (64, 80, and 96 cm) using three subjective hammering forces (light, medium, and heavy).

Adaptive Integration of the Compressed Algorithm of CS and NPC for the ECG Signal Compressed Algorithm in VLSI Implementation.

Compressed sensing (CS) is a promising approach to the compression and reconstruction of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. It has been shown that following reconstruction, most of the changes between the original and reconstructed signals are distributed in the Q, R, and S waves (QRS) region. Furthermore, any increase in the compression ratio tends to increase the magnitude of the change.

Hardware design and implementation of a wavelet de-noising procedure for medical signal preprocessing.

In this paper, a discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based de-noising with its applications into the noise reduction for medical signal preprocessing is introduced. This work focuses on the hardware realization of a real-time wavelet de-noising procedure. The proposed de-noising circuit mainly consists of three modules: a DWT, a thresholding, and an inverse DWT (IDWT) modular circuits.

Target locations in visual field and character recognition by students of Chinese.

The potential influence of target location in a visual field on search should be considered in layouts of control panels and advertisements. This investigation was done to verify the assumption that the upper-left portion of a page or its equivalent naturally attracts the attention of the viewer. Exp.