Healthcare Technologies

Team Members

  • Vinay Chamola (Senior Member, IEEE)

Collaborators

  • K.K. Raymond Choo, UTSA, USA

Our publications in Healthcare Technologies

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The unprecedented outbreak of the 2019 novel coronavirus, termed as COVID-19 by the World Health Organization (WHO), has placed numerous governments around the world in a precarious position. The impact of the COVID-19 outbreak, earlier witnessed by the citizens of China alone, has now become a matter of grave concern for virtually every country in the world. The scarcity of resources to endure the COVID-19 outbreak combined with the fear of overburdened healthcare systems has forced a majority of these countries into a state of partial or complete lockdown. The number of laboratory-confirmed coronavirus cases has been increasing at an alarming rate throughout the world, with reportedly more than 3 million confirmed cases as of 30 April 2020. Adding to these woes, numerous false reports, misinformation, and unsolicited fears in regards to coronavirus, are being circulated regularly since the outbreak of the COVID-19. In response to such acts, we draw on various reliable sources to present a detailed review of all the major aspects associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to the direct health implications associated with the outbreak of COVID-19, this study highlights its impact on the global economy. In drawing things to a close, we explore the use of technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), blockchain, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and 5G, among others, to help mitigate the impact of COVID-19 outbreak.
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With the recent use of IoT in the field of healthcare, a lot of patient data is being transmitted and made available online. This necessitates sufficient security measures to be put in place to prevent the possibilities of cyberattacks. In this regard, several authentication techniques have been designed in recent times to mitigate these challenges, but the physical security of the healthcare IoT devices against node tampering and node replacement attacks in particular is not addressed sufficiently in the literature. To address these challenges, a two-way two-stage authentication protocol using hardware security primitives called Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) is presented in this paper. Considering the memory and energy constraints of healthcare IoT devices, this protocol is made very lightweight. A formal security evaluation of this protocol is done to prove its validity. We also compare it with relevant protocols in the healthcare IoT scenario in terms of computation time and security to show its suitability and robustness.
 
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With the increasing incidence rate of lung cancer patients, early diagnosis could help in reducing the mortality rate. However, accurate recognition of cancerous lesions is immensely challenging owing to factors such as low contrast variation, heterogeneity, and visual similarity between benign and malignant nodules. Deep learning techniques have been very effective in performing natural image segmentation with robustness to previously unseen situations, reasonable scale invariance, and the ability to detect even minute differences. However, they usually fail to learn domain-specific features due to the limited amount of available data and domain agnostic nature of these techniques. Moreover, the interpretability limitations of the deep learning approaches hamper the capability of CAD in diagnostic assistance. This work presents an ensemble framework Deep3DSCan for lung cancer segmentation and classification. The deep 3D segmentation network generates the 3D volume of interest (VOI) from CT scans of patients. The deep features and handcrafted descriptors are extracted using a fine-tuned residual network (ResNet) and morphological techniques, respectively. Finally, the fused features are used for cancer classification. The experiments were conducted on the publicly available LUNA16 dataset. For the segmentation, We achieved an accuracy of 0.927, significant improvement over the Template Matching technique, which had achieved an accuracy of 0.927. For the detection, previous state-of-the-art is 0.866, while ours is 0.883.
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A Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) acts as a communication mechanism using brain signals to control external devices. The generation of such signals is sometimes independent of the nervous system, such as in Passive BCI. This is majorly beneficial for those who have severe motor disabilities. Traditional BCI systems have been dependent only on brain signals recorded using Electroencephalography (EEG) and have used a rule-based translation algorithm to generate control commands. However, the recent use of multi-sensor data fusion and machine learning-based translation algorithms has improved the accuracy of such systems. This paper discusses various BCI applications such as tele-presence, grasping of objects, navigation, etc. that use multi-sensor fusion and machine learning to control a humanoid robot to perform a desired task. The paper also includes a review of the methods and system design used in the discussed applications.
 
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Aerial scenes captured by UAVs have immense potential in IoT applications related to urban surveillance, road and building segmentation, land cover classification, etc. which are necessary for the evolution of smart cities. The advancements in deep learning have greatly enhanced visual understanding, but the domain of aerial vision remains largely unexplored. Aerial images pose many unique challenges for performing proper scene parsing such as high-resolution data, small-scaled objects, a large number of objects in the camera view, dense clustering of objects, background clutter, etc., which greatly hinder the performance of the existing deep learning methods. In this work, we propose ISDNet (Instance Segmentation and Detection Network), a novel network to perform instance segmentation and object detection on visual data captured by UAVs. This work enables aerial image analytics for various needs in a smart city. In particular, we use dilated convolutions to generate improved spatial context, leading to better discrimination between foreground and background features. The proposed network efficiently reuses the segment-mask features by propagating them from early stages using residual connections. Furthermore, ISDNet makes use of effective anchors to accommodate varying object scales and sizes. The proposed method obtains state-of-the-art results in the aerial context.Aerial scenes captured by UAVs have immense potential in IoT applications related to urban surveillance, road and building segmentation, land cover classification, etc. which are necessary for the evolution of smart cities. The advancements in deep learning have greatly enhanced visual understanding, but the domain of aerial vision remains largely unexplored. Aerial images pose many unique challenges for performing proper scene parsing such as high-resolution data, small-scaled objects, a large number of objects in the camera view, dense clustering of objects, background clutter, etc., which greatly hinder the performance of the existing deep learning methods. In this work, we propose ISDNet (Instance Segmentation and Detection Network), a novel network to perform instance segmentation and object detection on visual data captured by UAVs. This work enables aerial image analytics for various needs in a smart city. In particular, we use dilated convolutions to generate improved spatial context, leading to better discrimination between foreground and background features. The proposed network efficiently reuses the segment-mask features by propagating them from early stages using residual connections. Furthermore, ISDNet makes use of effective anchors to accommodate varying object scales and sizes. The proposed method obtains state-of-the-art results in the aerial context.
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Parking lot allocation problem has received much attention in recent years. There have been various works in the literature that target the parking slot allocation problem. However, most of these works use algorithms that run on centralized servers and are based on some predictions on historical data. Due to the dynamic nature of vehicular networks, the accuracy of such prediction models is not high which ends up in a chaotic situation for the parking lot owners as well as the vehicle owners. Therefore, a distributed Parking slot Allocation Framework based on Adaptive Pricing Algorithm and Virtual Voting is proposed in this paper. The proposed model is based on virtual voting and hashgraph consensus algorithm. Using the model, all users and parking lot owners can easily come to consensus finality about the allocation of a parking slot with the use of minimal bandwidth. The proposed model provides a fair, fast and cost-optimal parking slot allocation method. The perfect ordering of allocation requests is also maintained based on consensus timestamp. Further, an adaptive pricing model is proposed to enhance the overall revenue of the parking lot owners and comfort of the users. The proposed model is deterministic and can reduce the average parking cost and time. Performance evaluations reveal that the proposed model outperforms its counterparts in terms of accurate parking slot allocation, reduced cost and parking lot resource utilization.