Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering最新文献

{"title":"Evaluating the generalization of machine learning models for predicting 14-day mortality in traumatic brain injury patients","authors":"Fabio Arthur Soares Araújo ,&nbsp;Robson Luis Oliveira de Amorim ,&nbsp;Marly Guimarães Fernandes Costa ,&nbsp;Henrique Oliveira Martins ,&nbsp;Cicero Ferreira Fernandes Costa Filho","doi":"10.1016/j.bbe.2025.08.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bbe.2025.08.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) remains a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, with significant disparities in outcomes influenced by regional healthcare access and infrastructure. This study evaluates the performance and generalizability of machine learning models for predicting 14-day mortality in TBI patients using datasets from two distinct Brazilian regions: São Paulo, an urban center, and Manaus, an isolated urban center with unique logistical challenges. To our knowledge, this research represents the first cross-validation of predictive models across two datasets within the same country, underscoring the critical need for localized approaches in TBI research. Our findings indicate that while convolutional neural network (CNN)-based models achieved high performance, with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.90 in São Paulo and 0.93 in Manaus, the best model from São Paulo exhibited a strikingly low AUC when applied to the Manaus dataset. The incorporation of context-specific features, such as pandemic-related variables and time from trauma to admission, significantly enhanced model accuracy, with the Manaus model reaching an impressive AUC of 0.98. Notably, the study highlights key regional differences in predictors of mortality, with hypoxia and hypotension being more critical in Manaus, emphasizing the importance of tailoring predictive models to local contexts. These regionally important variables identified in the ML prediction model may inform quality-improvement priorities and further research in these settings. Our results indicate that CNN-based models have the potential to enhance mortality predictions for patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI).</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55381,"journal":{"name":"Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering","volume":"45 3","pages":"Pages 560-571"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144826418","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Robust dual-hormone controller for full closed-loop glucose regulation in people with type 1 diabetes: An in silico study","authors":"Emilia Fushimi ,&nbsp;Fernando Daniel Bianchi ,&nbsp;Hernán De Battista ,&nbsp;Fabricio Garelli","doi":"10.1016/j.bbe.2025.05.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bbe.2025.05.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Current advanced methods for glucose control in people with type 1 diabetes (T1D), often referred to as artificial pancreas (AP) or automated insulin delivery (AID) systems, rely on the administration of a single hormone (insulin) to regulate blood glucose (BG). In general, these systems depend on patient-specific information usually obtained from the conventional insulin therapy to account for inter-patient variability. On the other hand, dual-hormone (DH) systems that use insulin and its counterregulatory hormone, glucagon, have the potential of further improving BG control. However, DH systems are still under development or in earlier testing stages. Since glucagon is not used in the traditional therapy for T1D, the sensitivity of each individual to this hormone is typically unknown. Here, a DH controller based on robust control is proposed. The controller in charge of glucagon dosing, based on H∞ optimal control, does not require any individualization, thus overcoming one of the challenges faced by DH approaches. The strategy is evaluated <em>in silico</em> and compared to previous works involving a personalized glucagon controller and its single-hormone counterpart. Results suggest that the robust control strategy allows satisfactory glucose outcomes without the need for individualization.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55381,"journal":{"name":"Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering","volume":"45 3","pages":"Pages 329-339"},"PeriodicalIF":5.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144072655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Assessment of the intermuscular coherence for the early detection of diabetic peripheral neuropathy: a cross-sectional study","authors":"I. Junquera-Godoy ,&nbsp;J.L. Martinez-De-Juan ,&nbsp;G. González Lorente ,&nbsp;J.M. Carot-Sierra ,&nbsp;J. Gomis-Tena ,&nbsp;J. Saiz ,&nbsp;G.C. Mas Penalva ,&nbsp;E. Soler Climent ,&nbsp;G. Prats-Boluda","doi":"10.1016/j.bbe.2025.05.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bbe.2025.05.003","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a global epidemic marked by chronic hyperglycaemia due to insulin insufficiency or resistance. Diabetic peripheral neuropathy (DPN) is a common complication of diabetes, affecting up to 50 % of patients. It typically presents as a distal, symmetric, length-dependent neuropathy. Early detection of DPN is crucial to mitigate its impact on quality of life and healthcare costs. While current diagnostic methods like nerve conduction studies have limitations, surface electromyography (sEMG) shows promise for its non-invasive, real-time neuromuscular assessments. This study explores the potential of sEMG, particularly through intermuscular coherence, to serve as a sensitive biomarker for early DPN detection. Two coherence parameters, partial coherence (PC) and partial directed coherence (PDC), based on the Multivariate Autoregressive (MVAR) models have been analysed in three population groups: 33 healthy volunteers (CT), 10 diabetic patients with a low risk of DPN (LW), and 17 moderate/high-risk patients (MH). In early-stage DPN, synergistic muscle pairs showed increased PC and PDC values compared to controls, likely due to neuronal hyperexcitability and compensatory mechanisms within the nervous system. In contrast, advanced DPN stages exhibited reduced coherence, reflecting nerve fiber loss and central nervous system (CNS) impairment, possibly exacerbated by structural CNS changes like spinal cord atrophy, affecting neural plasticity and adaptation. Our study found that the dorsiflexor muscle pair, especially in the bandwidth 10–50 Hz of the PDC parameter, effectively discriminated between DPN stages, distinguishing all three groups with statistical significance. This suggests its potential as an early detection biomarker for DPN and for monitoring disease progression.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55381,"journal":{"name":"Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering","volume":"45 3","pages":"Pages 305-318"},"PeriodicalIF":5.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143922904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dysphonia discovering using a Goertzel algorithm implementation for vocal signals analysis","authors":"Patrizia Vizza ,&nbsp;Giuseppe Tradigo ,&nbsp;Pietro Hiram Guzzi ,&nbsp;Pierangelo Veltri","doi":"10.1016/j.bbe.2025.07.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bbe.2025.07.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div><em>Background and objectives:</em> The identification, study and classification of anomalies in vocal signals are used to support physicians in the diagnosis and monitoring of vocal robe pathologies. Dysphonia is the most common disorder causing difficulties in voice production. Dysphonia refers to any impairment in voice quality, and significantly impacts on the quality of life. Early detection is imperative to prevent severe pathologies or to early detect chronic ones. Voice signal processing techniques, such as Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and Praat, are noninvasive tools used to study phonatory apparatus diseases. Nevertheless there is room for improving efficacy in vocal signal patterns identification that could be related to vocal robe related pathologies.</div><div><em>Methods:</em> The focus is on the possibility of using Goertzel Algorithm (GA) characteristics to improve state of the art for pattern identification in vocal signals. A tool for early identification of dysphonia based on GA is presented. An optimized version of GA, able to detect voice frequency anomalies has been implemented.</div><div><em>Results:</em> The proposed tool has been tested with vocal signal datasets containing both normophonic and pathological subjects. The results are reported in terms of different implementation strategies and techniques. Experimental tests were performed comparing GA based and FFT based signal analysis tools in terms of: (i) efficiency and (ii) capacity of features identification. Performance parameters report: (i) an efficiency in terms of processing time improved by 37 % (i.e. 16.78 ms for FFT vs 12.26 ms for GA) and memory requirements reduced by 74 %; (ii) GA enabled the identification of healthy and pathological conditions better than FFT with a significance level below 0.05.</div><div><em>Conclusions:</em> Results of using GA-based method on vocal signal processing, compared with existing methods, demonstrate the reliability of the proposed method in early identification of dysphonia and in clinical monitoring of patients post treatment.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55381,"journal":{"name":"Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering","volume":"45 3","pages":"Pages 469-475"},"PeriodicalIF":5.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144556997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The impact of tongue size on submental negative pressure treatment of airway obstruction revealed by fluid-structure interaction simulations","authors":"Yuhang Tian ,&nbsp;Huahui Xiong ,&nbsp;Hui Tong ,&nbsp;Changjin Ji ,&nbsp;Xiaoqing Huang ,&nbsp;Yaqi Huang","doi":"10.1016/j.bbe.2025.08.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bbe.2025.08.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The continuous negative external pressure (cNEP) applied on the submental surface is a method of non-surgical treatment for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), which can effectively widen the airway in some OSA patients. However, it cannot effectively improve airway collapse in obese patients and its mechanism remains unclear. In this study, we aim to analyze the reasons for the ineffectiveness of cNEP treatment in OSA patients with obesity. Based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), three-dimensional models of the head and neck were constructed for a healthy subject, an OSA patient with enlarged tongue, and an OSA patient with the tongue adjusted to normal size. By performing the one step staggered fluid–structure interaction numerical simulations, we analyzed the collapse of the airway in these three models under the influence of cNEP. Restoring the tongue to normal size in the OSA patient significantly improves the airway critical closing pressure under cNEP treatment compared to the patient with enlarged tongue. The enlargement of the tongue in the OSA patient hindered the widening of the velopharyngeal airway under the action of cNEP. The numerical results reveal that cNEP treatment can effectively widen the laryngopharyngeal airway, thus providing a potential therapeutic option for OSA patients with laryngopharyngeal obstruction. Tongue enlargement in OSA patients is a critical factor influencing the efficacy of cNEP treatment. This study reveals the reasons for cNEP treatment failure in obese patients and the potential value of cNEP targeted therapy.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55381,"journal":{"name":"Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering","volume":"45 3","pages":"Pages 590-599"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144911947","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Diffusion tensor imaging technique for studying brain microstructural changes in Parkinson’s disease patients","authors":"Beata Toczylowska ,&nbsp;Małgorzata Michałowska ,&nbsp;Malgorzata Chalimoniuk ,&nbsp;Piotr Ladyzynski ,&nbsp;Leszek Krolicki ,&nbsp;Urszula Fiszer","doi":"10.1016/j.bbe.2025.05.010","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bbe.2025.05.010","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) was used to observe degeneration processes at the microstructural and functional levels in the brains of patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Two tensor-based unscented Kalman filter (UKF) was used for analyses of eight regions: the substantia nigra, putamen, caudate nucleus, globus pallidus, primary motor cortex, preprimary motor cortex, supplementary motor area (SMA), presupplementary motor area (pre-SMA), and whole brain of patients with PD (n = 14) and controls (n = 12). We analyzed eight DTI metrics in the entire brain and eight brain regions separately for each hemisphere using univariate and multivariate statistical analysis and their correlation with the clinical parameters. The most affected brain regions in patients with PD were the substantia nigra, pre-SMA, globus pallidus, and caudate nucleus. These results suggest that DTI is an adequate tool for evaluating structural and functional alterations, including inflammation, reduced fiber length, changes in neurite density, axonal growth, demyelination, and axonal damage or loss, in the studied brain regions of patients with PD. The results also revealed a generalized brain degeneration process. In conclusion, DTI can be applied for in vivo studies of the degenerative process and could be considered a complementary method in future studies to improve the accuracy of PD diagnosis.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55381,"journal":{"name":"Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering","volume":"45 3","pages":"Pages 426-437"},"PeriodicalIF":5.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144177851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A novel device for proprioceptive acuity measurement: Validity and reliability analysis in young and older adults","authors":"Sayedmohsen Mortazavi Najafabadi ,&nbsp;Dariusz Grzelczyk ,&nbsp;Mohammed N. Ashtiani","doi":"10.1016/j.bbe.2025.08.005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bbe.2025.08.005","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Age, neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes, and sports injuries can all impair proprioception, i.e. a crucial sensory feedback system for balance control and gait. The purpose of this study was to assess the validity and reliability of a recently constructed device for measuring proprioceptive function. Forty-seven participants, comprising 26 younger healthy adults (20–40 years) and 21 older adults (&gt; 65 years), were evaluated. The ankle’s sense of motion (SoM) sensitivity and sense of position (SoP, active/passive) acuity were measured by the device. The Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC) and the Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC-ROC) were used as indicators of reliability and validity. The results showed excellent reliability for SoM sensitivity in dorsiflexion (ICC = 0.985 for younger, 0.98 for older) and plantarflexion (ICC = 0.972 for younger, 0.982 for older). High reliability was also observed in passive SoP acuity (ICC = 0.825 – 0.989). However, the reliability of the active SoP acuity method was poor to moderate. Strong discriminative validity was demonstrated by the AUC-ROC values, with SoM sensitivity distinguishing between younger and older participants with an accuracy of over 91 %. Bland-Altman analysis revealed tighter agreement for SoM sensitivity (18 to 40 % of the device precision) than passive SoP acuity (70 to 90 % of the device precision), as well as minimal systematic bias (−0.03 to −0.01 degrees) to show interday test–retest reliability. According to these results, the device is valid for evaluating proprioceptive function, particularly SoM sensitivity, and it may be useful in clinical and research settings.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55381,"journal":{"name":"Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering","volume":"45 3","pages":"Pages 580-589"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144903181","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Deep spatio-temporal features optimised fusion with coordinate attention mechanism for EEG lower limb pre-movement intention decoding","authors":"Runlin Dong ,&nbsp;Xiaodong Zhang ,&nbsp;Zhengzheng Zhou ,&nbsp;Wenyu Zha ,&nbsp;Aibin Zhu","doi":"10.1016/j.bbe.2025.06.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bbe.2025.06.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><h3>Background and Objective</h3><div>Decoding pre-movement intention is crucial in developing a brain-computer interface (BCI) for neuro-rehabilitation robotic systems. However, the weak amplitude and non-smooth characteristics of EEG signals lead to the inability of existing methods to achieve the accuracy for proper applications. This study proposed a novel pre-movement intention decoding network framework to improve accuracy by extracting and optimizing the deep spatio-temporal features of EEG signals.</div></div><div><h3>Methods</h3><div>A deep spatio-temporal neural network structure was constructed based on the brain intention generation mechanism and its movement expression. The collected multi-channel EEG data were reorganized into brain topographic distributions, after the initial extraction of the features and optimization using the coordinate attention mechanism, a 3-layer dense block with two bi-directional gated recirculation units was designed to effectively extract the deep spatial and temporal features, further decoding the pre-movement intention efficiently.</div></div><div><h3>Results</h3><div>The experimental results showed an average accuracy of 95.51 ± 1.79 % for healthy subjects and 90.48 ± 2.90 % for stroke survivors in decoding pre-movement intention. All evaluation indexes are excellent. Pseudo-online testing showed the average TPR was 95.45 ± 3.80 % and 90.71 ± 7.77 % for healthy subjects and stroke survivors, respectively, and the latency was −1965 ± 48 ms and −1974 ± 36 ms. The results of the ablation and comparative analysis showed that the proposed framework is justified and its decoding capability outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms.</div></div><div><h3>Conclusion</h3><div>The method proposed in this study has high decoding accuracy and good online performance in pre-movement intention decoding based on EEG signals, which lays the foundation for further neuro-rehabilitation robotic systems.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55381,"journal":{"name":"Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering","volume":"45 3","pages":"Pages 515-527"},"PeriodicalIF":5.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144702745","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Multi-scale CNN-Swin transformer network with boundary supervision for multiclass biomarker segmentation in retinal OCT images","authors":"Zhanpeng Fan ,&nbsp;Xiaoming Liu ,&nbsp;Ying Zhang ,&nbsp;Jia Zhang","doi":"10.1016/j.bbe.2025.05.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bbe.2025.05.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Retinal biomarker morphology is closely associated with a variety of chronic ophthalmic diseases, in which biomarker localization and segmentation in optical coherence tomography (OCT) play a key role in the diagnosis of retina-related diseases. Although great progress has been made in deep learning based OCT biomarker segmentation, several challenges still exist. Due to issues such as image noise or class imbalance, retinal biomarkers affect the model’s recognition of other biomarkers. Moreover, small biomarkers are prone to lose accuracy during downsampling. And most existing methods rely on convolutional neural networks, which make it challenging to obtain the global context due to locality of convolution. Benefiting from the Swin Transformer with powerful modeling capabilities, we propose MSCS-Net (Multi-scale CNN-Swin Network), a network for OCT biomarker segmentation, which effectively combines CNN and Swin Transformer and integrates them in parallel into a dual-encoder structure. Specifically, an edge detection path is added alongside to enhance the localization of biomarkers at the edges. For the Swin Transformer branch, considering the irregular distribution of most OCT biomarkers, a new windowing partition is performed in the Swin Transformer to capture the features more efficiently. Meanwhile, we design a Feature Dimensionality Reduction Module to extensively collect the information of small-scale biomarkers. To effectively integrate information from two scales, we design a Transformer Cross Fusion Module to finely fuse the global and local feature information from the two-branch encoders. We validate the proposed approach on local and public datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55381,"journal":{"name":"Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering","volume":"45 3","pages":"Pages 340-356"},"PeriodicalIF":5.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144090191","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A novel approach for remote ultrasonography of knee osteoarthritis","authors":"Angela Sorriento ,&nbsp;Lorena Guachi-Guachi ,&nbsp;Giorgia Marola ,&nbsp;Paolo Spinnato ,&nbsp;Fabien Rabusseau ,&nbsp;Paolo Cabras ,&nbsp;Erik Dumont ,&nbsp;Leonardo Ricotti ,&nbsp;Andrea Cafarelli","doi":"10.1016/j.bbe.2025.05.009","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bbe.2025.05.009","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this study, we propose innovative technologies and a novel standardized procedure, enabling at-home, periodic and reliable ultrasound monitoring of knee osteoartrithis.</div><div>Anatomical and ultrasound data were collected on a population of 27 volunteers with different anthropometric features, leading to the development of two technological solutions: i) three probe positioning systems (wearable brace, adhesive film, temporary tattoo), provided with predefined openings to ensure accurate and repeatable placement of an ultrasound probe; ii) an image selection algorithm for automatic identification of the correct ultrasound images acquired by non-expert users.</div><div>The effectiveness and usability of these solutions were tested on 20 volunteers and 20 caregivers, with no prior experience in ultrasound imaging. In the first step, an expert radiologist acquired reference ultrasound images. In the second step, all volunteers exploited the positioning systems to place the probe and acquire informative images (automatically extracted by the algorithm from a video).</div><div>The average usability percentage score was highest for the wearable brace (98.7%), followed by the tattoo (94.8%), and film (89.6%). Overall, the three positioning systems proved to be effective in guiding ultrasound acquisitions for inexperienced subjects. The highest average rate of informative images successffully acquired among all volunteers was achieved by using the brace (70%), while the highest average score among the caregivers was obtained using the tattoo (76%).</div><div>These findings highlight the possibility to perform reliable remote ultrasound acquisitions for non-expert users and opens the way to novel tele-ultrasound procedures, enabling a precise, asynchronous, and repeatable monitoring of knee osteoarthritis.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55381,"journal":{"name":"Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering","volume":"45 3","pages":"Pages 319-328"},"PeriodicalIF":5.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144070282","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}