Globally, the surge in disease and urgency in maintaining social distancing has reawakened the use of telemedicine/telehealth. Amid the global health crisis, the world adopted the culture of online ...consultancy. Thus, there is a need to revamp the conventional model of the telemedicine system as per the current challenges and requirements. Security and privacy of data are main aspects to be considered in this era. Data-driven organizations also require compliance with regulatory bodies, such as HIPAA, PHI, and GDPR. These regulatory compliance bodies must ensure user data privacy by implementing necessary security measures. Patients and doctors are now connected to the cloud to access medical records, e.g., voice recordings of clinical sessions. Voice data reside in the cloud and can be compromised. While searching voice data, a patient’s critical data can be leaked, exposed to cloud service providers, and spoofed by hackers. Secure, searchable encryption is a requirement for telemedicine systems for secure voice and phoneme searching. This research proposes the secure searching of phonemes from audio recordings using fully homomorphic encryption over the cloud. It utilizes IBM’s homomorphic encryption library (HElib) and achieves indistinguishability. Testing and implementation were done on audio datasets of different sizes while varying the security parameters. The analysis includes a thorough security analysis along with leakage profiling. The proposed scheme achieved higher levels of security and privacy, especially when the security parameters increased. However, in use cases where higher levels of security were not desirous, one may rely on a reduction in the security parameters.
Macular edema (ME) is considered as one of the major indications of proliferative diabetic retinopathy and it is commonly caused due to diabetes. ME causes retinal swelling due to the accumulation of ...protein deposits within subretinal layers. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging provides an early detection of ME by showing the cross-sectional view of macular pathology. Many researchers have worked on automated identification of macular edema from fundus images, but this paper proposes a fully automated method for extracting and analyzing subretinal layers from OCT images using coherent tensors. These subretinal layers are then used to predict ME from candidate images using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. A total of 71 OCT images of 64 patients are collected locally in which 15 persons have ME and 49 persons are healthy. Our proposed system has an overall accuracy of 97.78% in correctly classifying ME patients and healthy persons. We have also tested our proposed implementation on spectral domain OCT (SD-OCT) images of the Duke dataset consisting of 109 images from 10 patients and it correctly classified all healthy and ME images in the dataset.
Highlights • This paper proposes a novel approach to automatically diagnose Macular Edema (ME), Central Serous Retinopathy (CSR) and healthy pathologies from Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) ...volumes through robust reconstruction of 3D OCT retinal surfaces. • To the best of our knowledge, this paper proposes a first ever novel approach to incorporate 3D OCT volumes to automatically diagnose and screen ME, CSR and healthy subjects. • The proposed method is fully automated and it uses a Support Vector Machine (SVM) based multilevel classification system to diagnose all the three types of macular pathologies from OCT volumes. Rather than relying on a single B-Scan selected subjectively, the proposed method incorporates all the B-Scan of the OCT volume to reconstruct 3D retinal surfaces which depicts the accurate visualization of retinal thickness within macular pathology. • 90 OCT volumes (30 Healthy, 30 CSR and 30 ME) of 73 patients were considered in this research to test the proposed system where our proposed system correctly classified 89 out of 90 cases with accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of 98.88%, 100%, 96.66% respectively.
The macula is an oval-shaped area near the center of the human retina, and at its center, there is a small pit known as the fovea. The fovea contains large concentrations of cone cells and is ...responsible for sharp, colored vision. Macular disorders are the group of diseases that damage the macula, resulting in blurred vision or even blindness. Macular edema (ME), one of the most common types of macular disorder, is caused by fluid accumulation beneath the macula. In this paper, we present an automated system for the detection of ME from fundus images. We introduce a new automated system for the detailed grading of the severity of disease using knowledge of exudates and maculae. A new set of features is used along with a minimum distance classifier for accurate localization of the fovea, which is important for the grading of ME. The proposed system uses different hybrid features and support vector machines for segmentation of exudates. The detailed grading of ME-as both clinically significant ME and non-clinically significant ME-is done using localized foveae and segmented exudates. The proposed algorithm is validated using public and local data sets. We have achieved an average accuracy of 96.1% in the detection and grading of ME with our proposed method.
It is an age of the Internet and electronic media, and social media platforms are one of the most frequently used communication medium nowadays. But some people use these sites for malicious purpose ...and among those negative aspects "Cyberbullying" is prevalent. Cyberbullying is a form of bullying done through electronic means and is used to insult or harm others. Many researchers have proposed solutions and strategies to overcome this menace, but sarcasm is one aspect of it that still needs to be touched. This study aims to highlight previous researchers and to propose an approach to detect cyberbullying along with the element of sarcasm included in it. The results proved that SVM classifier performed better than other classifiers.
Internet of Things is a recent potential advancement in an IT arena, consists of multiple smart things (devices) which are connected through a physical network. Cisco incorporation predicts that IoT ...network will connect 50 billion devices by 2020. Most of the industries are adopting IoT technology and because of its fast spreading, immense adoption and deployment current authentication mechanisms have serious disadvantages. For numerous reasons the security issues are the major hurdle in adoption and deployment of IoT on a large scale since it is highly vulnerable to attacks. In this paper we propose a Blockchain based authentication mechanism i.e. Ethereum which is a public blockchain as it has emerged as a technology that possess great capabilities of providing secure authentication, management and access control for IoT devices in a decentralized, trusty and flexible manner by creating a secure environment where the devices can identify and trust each other and only authenticated users are given permission to access them.
The terms “exposure enhancement” and “contrast enhancement” are usually used interchangeably for image enhancement in low-light acquisitions. This paper argues that the two processes are anything but ...alike. While exposure can be inferred from low frequency or background of an image, contrast by definition refers to the ratio of the foreground with the background. We break down the Lambertian illumination model in a multiresolution framework and show how foreground and background at different levels contribute to contrast and exposure enhancement. Following this, a fast multiresolution low-light enhancement scheme is proposed that achieves a frame rate of 19.62 frames per second on standard quad core processor without employing any graphical processing unit. Experiments reveal that the proposed scheme is not only fast, it also achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of subjective and objective assessment.
Internet of Things is a recent potential advancement in an IT arena, consists of multiple smart things (devices) which are connected through a physical network. Cisco incorporation predicts that IoT ...network will connect 50 billion devices by 2020. Most of the industries are adopting IoT technology and because of its fast spreading, immense adoption and deployment current authentication mechanisms have serious disadvantages. For numerous reasons the security issues are the major hurdle in adoption and deployment of IoT on a large scale since it is highly vulnerable to attacks. In this paper we propose a Blockchain based authentication mechanism i.e. Ethereum which is a public blockchain as it has emerged as a technology that possess great capabilities of providing secure authentication, management and access control for IoT devices in a decentralized, trusty and flexible manner by creating a secure environment where the devices can identify and trust each other and only authenticated users are given permission to access them.
It is an age of the Internet and electronic media, and social media platforms are one of the most frequently used communication medium nowadays. But some people use these sites for malicious purpose ...and among those negative aspects "Cyberbullying" is prevalent. Cyberbullying is a form of bullying done through electronic means and is used to insult or harm others. Many researchers have proposed solutions and strategies to overcome this menace, but sarcasm is one aspect of it that still needs to be touched. This study aims to highlight previous researchers and to propose an approach to detect cyberbullying along with the element of sarcasm included in it. The results proved that SVM classifier performed better than other classifiers.
It is an age of the Internet and electronic media, and social media platforms are one of the most frequently used communication medium nowadays. But some people use these sites for malicious purpose ...and among those negative aspects "Cyberbullying" is prevalent. Cyberbullying is a form of bullying done through electronic means and is used to insult or harm others. Many researchers have proposed solutions and strategies to overcome this menace, but sarcasm is one aspect of it that still needs to be touched. This study aims to highlight previous researchers and to propose an approach to detect cyberbullying along with the element of sarcasm included in it. The results proved that SVM classifier performed better than other classifiers.