Now showing 1 - 10 of 18
  • Publication
    A visual tracking range of motion assessment system for lower limb joint
    Accurate range of motion (ROM) measurement of lower limb joint motion is important for assessing the severity of human lower limb injuries. It is essential for assisting the medical doctor and physiotherapist to determine the suitable treatment and rehabilitation exercises that are required for lower limb injury patient specifically. Current medical measurement systems such as Universal Goniometer (UGM) has a large resolution of 1° which may cause to have observation error while Electrogoniometer (EGM) is affected by the inaccurate sensor’s position and detachment when moving due to its mechanical properties limitation. Thus, a visual tracking ROM assessment system (VTS) for lower limb joint measurement is proposed. The purpose of this investigation was to develop a method to quantify a ROM of the lower limb joint and examine the ROM obtained between the VTS with EGM and UGM, for the measurement of lower limb joint angles. There were three major experiments conducted i.e., Validation Experiment, Clinical Test and Clinical Case Study. Validation experiment was done on the developed visual tracking system before being applied on the real human subject to ensure the system performance and safety to be acceptable. The system had been tested under the several of light intensity level, camera distance, camera elevation angle and markers location to determine the optimum operating condition. In clinical test, there were two tests carried out; they were Healthy Control Test and Injured Subject Test. A total of 20 healthy control subjects’ findings proved that the left and right lower limbs of human were similar (99.80% ~ 97.64% of similarity) for the normal healthy subjects. Comparison between VTS, EGM and UGM found that the accuracy for each two systems compared to each other was significantly different for the VTS vs. EGM and the EGM vs. UGM. The VTS vs. UGM produced the highest accuracy for all the joint motions compared to VTS vs. EGM and the EGM vs. UGM; it was 99.46% for left knee flexion. In addition, total of 70 injured subjects (included ankle joint, knee joint, and hip joint) had undergone injured subject test to compare its severity level between illness and three measurement systems. In the injured subject test, VTS yielded the smallest coefficient of variation (CV) compared to the EGM and UGM for Knee flexion for moderate injuries which was 2.45%.
  • Publication
    Analysis of the performance of SLIC super-pixel toward pre-segmentation of soil-transmitted helminth
    (AIP Publishing, 2023)
    Loke Siew Wen
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    Norhanis Ayunie Ahmad Khairudin
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    Chong Yen Fook
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    Mohd Yusoff Mashor
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    Zeehaida Mohamed
    Soil-Transmitted Helminth (STH) infections are one of the most severe health issues in the world including Malaysia and frequently happened in an unsanitary environment within the children group. The helminth infections are diagnosed by inspecting the faeces samples manually through light microscope. However, the manual inspection method to diagnose the helminth egg is a time-consuming and challenging process especially when are huge number of samples. To increase the efficiency and accuracy of the diagnosis, an analysis of super-pixel segmentation with different parameter adjustments on four different species was carried out. This work described a Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC) super-pixel algorithm that uses different parameter settings to explore more parasites image features for a better segmentation process in the future and to analyse the effect of different SLIC parameter settings towards the pre-segmentation process. There is total 80 images collected from the four helminth egg species which are Ascaris Lumbricoides Ova (ALO), Enterobius Vermicularis Ova (EVO), Hookworm Ova (HWO) and Trichuris Trichiura Ova (TTO). The proposed approach is divided into three steps. First, the images with various lighting conditions are enhanced by the partial contrast stretching (PCS) technique. The simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) super-pixel algorithm was implemented to the enhanced images as a pre-segmentation algorithm to form super-pixel images. Lastly, image quality assessment will be performed on the SLIC images. The SLIC parameter compactness of super-pixel, m of 5 and number of super-pixels, k of 1000 was selected because they generate the greatest PSNR value, indicating that this combination of parameters could produce high-quality images. In future, a more in-depth analysis of the parameter k and m, which impacts the form of each super-pixel and the pre-segmentation process, might improve the recommended approach.
  • Publication
    Improvising non-uniform illumination and low contrast images of soil transmitted helminths image using contrast enhancement techniques
    ( 2021-01-01)
    Norhanis Ayunie Ahmad Khairudin
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    ; ; ;
    Mohamed Z.
    Image enhancement plays an important role in image processing and computer vision. It is used to enhance the visual appearance in an image and also to convert the image suited to the requirement needed for image processing. In this paper, image enhancement is used to produce a better image by enhancing the image quality and highlighting the morphological features of the helminth eggs. Result obtained from enhancement is prepared for segmentation and classification process. The helminth eggs used in this paper are Ascaris Lumbricoides Ova (ALO) and Trichuris Trichiura Ova (TTO). In this study, several enhancement techniques have been performed on 100 images of ALO and TTO which have been captured under three different illuminations: normal, under-exposed and over-exposed images. The techniques used are global contrast stretching, limit contrast, linear contrast stretching, modified global contrast stretching, modified linear contrast stretching, partial contrast and reduce haze. Based on results obtained from these techniques, modified linear contrast stretching and modified global contrast stretching are able to equalize the lighting in the non-uniform illumination images of helminth eggs. Both techniques are suitable to be used on non-uniform illumination images and also able to improve the contrast in the image without affecting or removing the key features in ALO and TTO images as compared to the other techniques. Hence, the resultant images would become useful for parasitologist in analyzing helminth eggs.
      1  27
  • Publication
    Performance analysis of multi-level thresholding for microaneurysm detection
    Diabetic retinopathy (DR) – one of the diabetes complications – is the leading cause of blindness among the age group of 20–74 years old. Fortunately, 90% of these cases (blindness due to DR) could be prevented by early detection and treatment via manual and regular screening by qualified physicians. The screening of DR is tedious, which can be subjective, time-consuming, and sometimes prone to misclassification. In terms of accuracy and time, many automated screening systems based on image processing have been developed to improve diagnostic performance. However, the accuracy and consistency of the developed systems are largely unaddressed, where a manual screening process is still the most preferred option. The main contribution of this paper is to analyse the accuracy and consistency of microaneurysm (MA) detection via image processing by focusing on Otsu’s multi-thresholding as it has been shown to work very well in many applications. The analysis was based on Monte Carlo statistical analysis using synthetic retinal images of retinal images under variation of all stages of DR, retinal, and image parameters – intensity difference between MAs and blood vessels (BVs), MA size, and measurement noise. Then, the conditions – in terms of obtainable retinal and image parameters – that guarantee accurate and consistent MA detection via image processing were extracted. Finally, the validity of the conditions to guarantee accurate and consistent MA detection was verified using real retinal images. The results showed that MA detection via image processing is guaranteed to be accurate and consistent when the intensity difference between MAs and BVs is at least 50% and the sizes of MAs are from 5 to 20 pixels depending on measurement noise values. These conditions are very important as a guideline of MA detection for DR.
      5  44
  • Publication
    A review on contact lens inspection
    ( 2023-08-01)
    Mana N.A.M.A.
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    Fook C.Y.
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    Ali Y.M.
    Over the year, contact lens detection has attracted attention and interest from many researchers to study further in this field of inspection. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the existing literature surrounding contact lens inspection methods. In this paper, contact lens-related, defects-related, and inspection methods related are described in detail. To detect contact lenses in a single image and also multi-image, numerous techniques have been developed and this paper is aimed at classifying and evaluating these algorithms. Also, contact lens inspection based on conventional and artificial intelligence methods will be discussed in detail. The industrial production process of contact lenses probably needs to be constructed with advanced tools based on recent technologies so that they can help in the inspection system to achieve accurate results of the inspection and reduce processing time.
      30  4
  • Publication
    Fast k-means clustering algorithm for malaria detection in thick blood smear
    ( 2020-11-09)
    Aris T.A.
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    ; ; ;
    Mohamed Z.
    Lots of people all over the world is threaten by a popular blood infection illness that is called as malaria. According to this fact, immediate diagnosis tests are essential to avoid the malaria parasites from expanding in every part of the body. Malaria detection is based on parasitic count process on thick blood smear samples. Anyhow, this mechanism consist the chances of misinterpretation of parasites on behalf to human flaws. Thus, this research objective is to investigate the segmentation performance for improving malaria detection in thick blood smear images through fast k-means clustering algorithm on various color models. In this research, fast kmeans clustering is used because of its advantage which is no need to retrain cluster center that causes time taken to train the image cluster centers is reduce. Meanwhile, different color models have been utilized in order to identify the most relevant color model that obviously highlight the parasites. Five varied color models namely RGB, XYZ, HSV, YUV and CMY are selected and 15 color components namely R, G, B, X, Y, Z, H, S, V, Y, U, V, C, M and Y component have been derived with the aim to discover which color component is the topnotch for malaria parasites detection. In general, around 100 thick blood smear images have been tested in this study and the outcomes reveal that the best segmentation performance is segmentation through R component of RGB with 99.81% accuracy.
      5  30
  • Publication
    Investigation on Medicated Drugs in ECG of Healthy Subjects
    Heart diseases are now the leading cause of death worldwide, it is estimated that around 7 million patients who are living in developed countries, lost their lives due to diseases related to their cardiovascular system. In Malaysia, cardiovascular diseases represents one fifth of total deaths in the country in the past three decades. Currently patients need some sort of drugs that help them to stabilize and restore the regular patterns of their heart beat because if the patients cannot manage to restore the normal heart beat pattern, the undesired heart condition could lead life threatening situations. Advancement of biotechnology has enabled the creation of new medicated drugs to provide better treatment options. However, when this treatment option fails and there is a need to provide emergency intervention to the patients in hospitals, the medical experts often need to know about the patients' intake of any medications prior to hospital admittance for providing suitable treatments. Sometimes, this would be a difficult task as the patient might be admitted in semi-conscious or unconscious state. Therefore, this study focusses on identification of different medicated drugs usage through analysis of ECG data of the users. The data for the experiment was obtained from physionet library, which provides ECG data of subjects administered with a combination of Dofetilide, Mexiletine, lidocaine, Moxifloxacin and Diltiazem medicated drugs. The use of morphological and non-linear features derived from the ECG signals were able to provide prediction accuracy of 77.26% using SVM classifier.
      45  2
  • Publication
    Investigation on Body Mass Index Prediction from Face Images
    ( 2021-03-01)
    Chong Yen Fook
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    Lim Whey Teen
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    Body mass index is a measurement of obesity based on measured height and weight of a person and classified as underweight, normal, overweight and obese. This paper reviews the investigation and evaluation of the body mass index prediction from face images. Human faces contain a number of cues that are able to be a subject of a study. Hence, face image is used to predict BMI especially for rural folks, patients that are paralyzed or severely ill patient who unable to undergoes basic BMI measurement and for emergency medical service. In this framework, 3 stages will be implemented including image pre-processing such as face detection that uses the technique of Viola-Jones, iris detection, image enhancement and image resizing, face feature extraction that use facial metric and classification that consists of 3 types of machine learning approaches which are artificial neural network, Support Vector Machine and k-nearest neighbor to analyze the performance of the classification. From the results obtained, artificial neural network is the best classifier for BMI prediction system with the highest recognition rate of 95.50% by using the data separation of 10% of testing data and 90% of training data. In a conclusion, this system will help to advance the study of social aspect based on the body weight.
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  • Publication
    Color constancy analysis approach for color standardization on malaria thick and thin blood smear images
    ( 2021-01-01)
    Thaqifah Ahmad Aris
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    ; ; ;
    Mohamed Z.
    Malaria is an extensively prevalent blood infection, the most severe and widespread parasitic disease that stirring millions of people in the world. Currently, microscopy diagnosis still the most widely used method for malaria diagnosis. However, this procedure contains the probability of miscalculation of parasites due to human error. Computerized system by using image processing is recognized as a quick and easy ways to analyze a lot of blood samples. However, because of the non-standard preparation of the blood slides which producing color varieties in different slides will result on low quality images. Hence, it is difficult to identify the existence of malaria parasites as well as observing its morphological characteristics to recognize malaria parasites. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze the standardization performance between six types of color constancy algorithms namely, gray world (GW), white patch (WP), modified white patch (MWP), progressive hybrid (PH), shades of gray (SoG) and gray edge (GE) on both thick and thin blood smear malaria images of P. falciparum and P. vivax species. Six types of color constancy algorithms standardization performance are analysed by using quantitative measure namely, peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), normalized absolute error (NAE), mean square error (MSE) and root mean square error (RMSE). Based on the qualitative and quantitative findings, the results show that SoG algorithm is the best color constancy as compared to others proposed color constancy. SoG algorithm has achieved the highest PSNR and lowest NAE, MSE and RMSE values, thus proved that the quality of malaria images have been improved.
      4  34
  • Publication
    Clinical validation of 3D mesh reconstruction system for spine curvature angle measurement
    ( 2023-02-21)
    Shanyu C.
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    Fook C.Y.
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    Azizan A.F.
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    Spine curvature disorders are scoliosis, lordosis, and kyphosis. These disorders are mainly caused by the bad habits of the person during sitting, standing, and lying. There are about 3 to 5 out of 1,000 people who are affected by spine curvature disorder. The current conventional method used for diagnose this disorder, such as radiography, goniometry and palpation. However, these conventional methods require human skills and can be time-consuming, resulting to exhaustion of logistic. Therefore, there is a need to solve this problem by creating a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to analyse the human body posture through the 3D reconstructed model of the person. Hence, 3D map meshing reconstruction of the human body method is proposed. This project divided into three parts, which are the development of the GUI for human posture analysis, clinical validation and posture analysis of the 3D model. The 3D model reconstructed from 3D mapping parameters shows 100% accuracy of the assessed point. The lowest difference of angle for the comparison between clinical method (goniometer) and the GUI for male is (A.Pe) 0.930±0.870 and 1.240±0.860 for female (P.Pe). This finding of 3D model assessment system can be helpful for medical doctor to diagnose patient who have spine problem.
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