Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of mortality and early assessment of carotid artery abnormalities with ultrasound is key for effective prevention. Obtaining the carotid diameter waveform is essential for hemodynamic parameter extraction. However, since it is not a trivial task to automate, compact computational models are needed to operate reliably in view of physiological variability. Modern machine learning (ML) techniques hold promise for fully automated carotid diameter extraction from ultrasonic data without requiring annotation by trained clinicians. Using a conventional digital signal processing (DSP) based approach as reference, our goal is to (a) build data-driven ML models to identify and track the carotid diameter, and (b) keep the computational complexity minimal for deployment in embedded systems. A ML pipeline is developed to estimate the carotid artery diameter from Hilbert-transformed ultrasound signals acquired at 500Hz sampling frequency. The proposed ML pipeline consists of 3 processing stages: two neural-network (NN) models and a smoothing filter. The first NN, a compact 3-layer convolutional NN (CNN), is a region-of-interest (ROI) detector confining the tracking to a reduced portion of the ultrasound signal. The second NN, an 8-layer (5 convolutional, 3 fully-connected) CNN, tracks the arterial diameter. It is followed by a smoothing filter for removing any superimposed artifacts. Data was acquired from 6 subjects (4 male, 2 female, 37 ± 7 years, baseline mean arterial pressure 86.3 ± 7.6 mmHg) at rest and with diameter variation induced by paced breathing and a hand grip intervention. The label reference is extracted from a fine-tuned DSP-based approach. After training, diameter waveforms are extracted and compared to the DSP reference. The predicted diameter waveform from the proposed NN-based pipeline has near perfect temporal alignment with the reference signal and does not suffer from drift. Specifically, we obtain a Pearson correlation coefficient of r = 0.87 between prediction and reference waveforms. The mean absolute deviation of the arterial diameter prediction was quantified as 0.077 mm, corresponding to a 1% error given an average carotid artery diameter of 7.5 mm in the study population. This work proposed and evaluated an ML neural network-based pipeline to track the carotid artery diameter from an ultrasound stream of A-mode frames. By contrast to current clinical practice, the proposed solution does not rely on specialist intervention (e.g. imaging markers) to track the arterial diameter. In contrast to conventional DSP-based counterpart solutions, the ML-based approach does not require handcrafted heuristics and manual fine-tuning to produce reliable estimates. Being trainable from small cohort data and reasonably fast, it is useful for quick deployment and easy to adjust accounting for demographic variability. Finally, its reliance on A-mode ultrasound frames renders the solution promising for miniaturization and deployment in on-line clinical and ambulatory monitoring.@en

To address the problem of training on small datasets for action recognition tasks, most prior works are either based on a large number of training samples or require pre-trained models transferred from other large datasets to tackle overfitting problems. However, it limits the research within organizations that have strong computational abilities. In this work, we try to propose a data-efficient framework that can train the model from scratch on small datasets while achieving promising results. Specifically, by introducing a 3D central difference convolution operation, we proposed a novel C3D neural network-based two-stream (Rank Pooling RGB and Optical Flow) framework for the task. The method is validated on the action recognition track of the ECCV 2020 VIPriors challenges and got the 2nd place (88.31%). It is proved that our method can achieve a promising result even without a pre-trained model on large scale datasets. The code will be released soon. @en

This paper presents an improved zero vibration method for the swing control of bridge-type grab ship unloader. With the method, the concepts of equivalent frequency and the equivalent damping ratio are proposed to cope with the changeable length of rope, and the optimal path planning is considered to avoid collision and improve efficiency. Numerical simulation results of a case study indicate that the maximum residual swing angle of the grab can be limited to a small range to ensure safety using the improved zero vibration method, whereas the traditional zero vibration method with average frequency and zero damping ratio gets poor results of swing control. After that, the sensitivities of the max residual swing angle to the changes of some main design parameters (damping coefficient, deviation of the center of gravity of the grab in rope direction, and time delay of the system) and operating parameters (position deviation of the trolley, initial length deviation of the rope, and initial swing angle) are analyzed. The results obtained display that the residual swing angle is sensitive to the deviation of grab’s center of gravity, the deviation of trolley’s position, and the initial swing angle under the same control parameters, but insensitive to the damping coefficient, the time delay of the system, and the initial length deviation of the rope. This can help to select the appropriate parameter values ​​or adaptive range in an actual unloader.@en