Objective: Triaxial accelerometers (TAAs) are widely used in homecare medicine. This study investigates whether TAA signals recorded at the fingertip encode respiratory information, particularly instantaneous respiratory rate (IRR) and respiratory effort, during sleep. Method: We propose an antiderivative-based nonlinear transformation to convert TAA signals into a respiratory surrogate, termed TAA-resp. To quantify the embedded respiratory-induced motion, a modern time-frequency analysis tool is applied to derive an index, referred to as the respiratory motion index (RMI). The proposed TAA-resp and RMI are validated on a dataset comprising 39 full-night recordings with simultaneous polysomnography (PSG) and a fingertip TAA measurements. Criteria for labeling TAA-resp signal quality as good, moderate, or poor are established, and expert annotations are obtained. Result: On average, TAA-resp over 22.2% $\pm$ 15.6% of full-night recordings encodes high-quality respiratory information, reaching up to 58.9% in some cases. TAA-resp shows stronger correlation with thoracic and abdominal motion than with airflow, indicating predominant capture of respiratory effort. High-quality TAA-resp
Respiratory rate is a vital indicator of pulmonary and cardiovascular health, yet conventional methods for estimating respiratory rate are often intrusive due to their contact-based nature. Remote photoplethysmography offers a promising non-contact alternative and has been widely used for heart rate estimation; however, its potential for respiratory rate estimation remains underexplored. Existing methods typically adapt green and chrominance-based projections originally designed for heart rate estimation, which only partially capture respiratory dynamics. Most prior work focuses on the Eulerian representation with fixed or empirically selected RGB projections. To address these gaps, we propose a skin-tone-aware dynamic RGB signal projection that captures respiratory information. To mitigate the sensitivity of the Lagrangian representation to non-respiratory motion, we introduce a denoising network for motion-based remote photoplethysmography signals. We further design a phase-independent contrastive loss that enables Eulerian and Lagrangian representations to collaboratively learn respiratory rate information. We also introduce RR-rPPG, a respiratory-rate facial video dataset with
Recognition of respiratory distress through visual inspection is a life saving clinical skill. Clinicians can detect early signs of respiratory deterioration, creating a valuable window for earlier intervention. In this study, we evaluate whether recent advances in video transformers can enable Artificial Intelligence systems to recognize the signs of respiratory distress from video. We collected videos of healthy volunteers recovering after strenuous exercise and used the natural recovery of each participants respiratory status to create a labeled dataset for respiratory distress. Splitting the video into short clips, with earlier clips corresponding to more shortness of breath, we designed a temporal ordering challenge to assess whether an AI system can detect respiratory distress. We found a ViViT encoder augmented with Lie Relative Encodings (LieRE) and Motion Guided Masking, combined with an embedding based comparison strategy, can achieve an F1 score of 0.81 on this task. Our findings suggest that modern video transformers can recognize subtle changes in respiratory mechanics.
Respiratory activity is a direct and interpretable physiological channel for wearable stress and affective-state recognition, yet many studies emphasize classification accuracy without identifying which respiratory properties separate different states. This work reframes RESP-based recognition as a joint predictive and explanatory problem. Using the chest respiratory channel of the WESAD dataset, we analyze 60 s windows under leave-one-subject-out validation and combine two complementary branches: compact raw-signal one-dimensional convolutional neural networks (1D-CNNs) and physically grouped handcrafted respiratory signatures. The primary application task is binary stress versus non-stress detection, while baseline, stress, amusement, and meditation are additionally analyzed in a one-vs-rest setting to reveal state-specific respiratory markers. The feature space is organized into respiratory timing, breath-to-breath variability, waveform statistics, spectral/time-frequency descriptors, and autocorrelation/nonlinear predictability descriptors, with the raw 60 s signal treated as a sixth representation for the CNN branch. We introduce autocorrelation transition lags (Zpm/Zmp) as in
Wave-driven desalination systems are an innovative solution to the global freshwater crisis, leveraging the complementary characteristics of seawater reverse osmosis and wave energy converters. However, the high costs of this system pose a significant barrier to widespread adoption. Optimization can help these systems reach a more competitive levelized cost of water, but the highly coupled nature of the system necessitates a multidisciplinary design optimization approach. This paper presents a holistic, multidisciplinary design optimization framework for wave-driven desalination system design, integrating models for wave energy converter hydrodynamics, power take-off transmission, seawater reverse osmosis constraints, and economic analysis. This study demonstrates the impact of multidisciplinary design optimization for wave-driven desalination systems, resulting in a 69.5% reduction in levelized cost of water compared to a nominal design. We demonstrate that multidisciplinary design optimization outperforms sequential design approaches, yielding lower levelized costs of water and substantially different optimal designs. The multidisciplinary design optimization results suggest majo
Precision medicine, tailored to individual patients based on their genetics, environment, and lifestyle, shows promise in managing complex diseases like infections. Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into precision medicine can revolutionize disease management. This paper introduces a novel approach using AI to advance precision medicine in infectious diseases and beyond. It integrates diverse fields, analyzing patients' profiles using genomics, proteomics, microbiomics, and clinical data. AI algorithms process vast data, providing insights for precise diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. AI-driven predictive modeling empowers healthcare providers to make personalized and effective interventions. Collaboration among experts from different domains refines AI models and ensures ethical and robust applications. Beyond infections, this AI-driven approach can benefit other complex diseases. Precision medicine powered by AI has the potential to transform healthcare into a proactive, patient-centric model. Research is needed to address privacy, regulations, and AI integration into clinical workflows. Collaboration among researchers, healthcare institutions, and policymakers is cruci
Auscultatory analysis using an electronic stethoscope has attracted increasing attention in the clinical diagnosis of respiratory diseases. Recently, neural networks have been applied to assist in respiratory sound classification with achievements. However, it remains challenging due to the scarcity of abnormal respiratory sound. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture, namely Waveform-Logmel audio neural networks (WLANN), which uses both waveform and log-mel spectrogram as the input features and uses Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Units (Bi-GRU) to context model the fused features. Experimental results of our WLANN applied to SPRSound respiratory dataset show that the proposed framework can effectively distinguish pathological respiratory sound classes, outperforming the previous studies, with 90.3% in sensitivity and 93.6% in total score. Our study demonstrates the high effectiveness of the WLANN in the diagnosis of respiratory diseases.
Recent advancements in foundation models have sparked interest in respiratory audio foundation models. However, the effectiveness of applying conventional pre-training schemes to datasets that are small-sized and lack diversity has not been sufficiently verified. This study aims to explore better pre-training practices for respiratory sounds by comparing numerous pre-trained audio models. Our investigation reveals that models pre-trained on AudioSet, a general audio dataset, are more effective than the models specifically pre-trained on respiratory sounds. Moreover, combining AudioSet and respiratory sound datasets for further pre-training enhances performance, and preserving the frequency-wise information when aggregating features is vital. Along with more insights found in the experiments, we establish a new state-of-the-art for the OPERA benchmark, contributing to advancing respiratory audio foundation models. Our code is available online at https://github.com/nttcslab/eval-audio-repr/tree/main/plugin/OPERA.
Model Medicine is the science of understanding, diagnosing, treating, and preventing disorders in AI models, grounded in the principle that AI models -- like biological organisms -- have internal structures, dynamic processes, heritable traits, observable symptoms, classifiable conditions, and treatable states. This paper introduces Model Medicine as a research program, bridging the gap between current AI interpretability research (anatomical observation) and the systematic clinical practice that complex AI systems increasingly require. We present five contributions: (1) a discipline taxonomy organizing 15 subdisciplines across four divisions -- Basic Model Sciences, Clinical Model Sciences, Model Public Health, and Model Architectural Medicine; (2) the Four Shell Model (v3.3), a behavioral genetics framework empirically grounded in 720 agents and 24,923 decisions from the Agora-12 program, explaining how model behavior emerges from Core--Shell interaction; (3) Neural MRI (Model Resonance Imaging), a working open-source diagnostic tool mapping five medical neuroimaging modalities to AI interpretability techniques, validated through four clinical cases demonstrating imaging, compari
In the field of scientometrics, the subject classification system of academic journals holds great importance. Accurate identification and classification of "multidisciplinary" journals are crucial in revealing the scientific structure and evaluating journals. Based on data from the Web of Science database from 2016 to 2020, we calculated the disciplinary diversity of journals using the paper-level subject classification system, then conducted a systematic analysis of JCR multidisciplinary journals. Studies showed that most multidisciplinary journals have high disciplinary diversity, while non-multidisciplinary journals tend to have relatively lower diversity. Some multidisciplinary journals with low disciplinary diversities may misclassify disciplines. In addition, there are inconsistencies in the diversity of journal disciplines at different granularities. Our study also visually analyzed the four types of diversity distribution tendencies of multidisciplinary journals. Moreover, ten potential multidisciplinary journals were found in non-multidisciplinary categories.
Respiratory audio, such as coughing and breathing sounds, has predictive power for a wide range of healthcare applications, yet is currently under-explored. The main problem for those applications arises from the difficulty in collecting large labeled task-specific data for model development. Generalizable respiratory acoustic foundation models pretrained with unlabeled data would offer appealing advantages and possibly unlock this impasse. However, given the safety-critical nature of healthcare applications, it is pivotal to also ensure openness and replicability for any proposed foundation model solution. To this end, we introduce OPERA, an OPEn Respiratory Acoustic foundation model pretraining and benchmarking system, as the first approach answering this need. We curate large-scale respiratory audio datasets (~136K samples, over 400 hours), pretrain three pioneering foundation models, and build a benchmark consisting of 19 downstream respiratory health tasks for evaluation. Our pretrained models demonstrate superior performance (against existing acoustic models pretrained with general audio on 16 out of 19 tasks) and generalizability (to unseen datasets and new respiratory audio
With the increasing interest in deploying Artificial Intelligence in medicine, we previously introduced HAIM (Holistic AI in Medicine), a framework that fuses multimodal data to solve downstream clinical tasks. However, HAIM uses data in a task-agnostic manner and lacks explainability. To address these limitations, we introduce xHAIM (Explainable HAIM), a novel framework leveraging Generative AI to enhance both prediction and explainability through four structured steps: (1) automatically identifying task-relevant patient data across modalities, (2) generating comprehensive patient summaries, (3) using these summaries for improved predictive modeling, and (4) providing clinical explanations by linking predictions to patient-specific medical knowledge. Evaluated on the HAIM-MIMIC-MM dataset, xHAIM improves average AUC from 79.9% to 90.3% across chest pathology and operative tasks. Importantly, xHAIM transforms AI from a black-box predictor into an explainable decision support system, enabling clinicians to interactively trace predictions back to relevant patient data, bridging AI advancements with clinical utility.
Respiratory diseases impose a significant burden on global health, with current diagnostic and management practices primarily reliant on specialist clinical testing. This work aims to develop machine learning-based algorithms to facilitate at-home respiratory disease monitoring and assessment for patients undergoing continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy. Data were collected from 30 healthy adults, encompassing respiratory pressure, flow, and dynamic thoraco-abdominal circumferential measurements under three breathing conditions: normal, panting, and deep breathing. Various machine learning models, including the random forest classifier, logistic regression, and support vector machine (SVM), were trained to predict breathing types. The random forest classifier demonstrated the highest accuracy, particularly when incorporating breathing rate as a feature. These findings support the potential of AI-driven respiratory monitoring systems to transition respiratory assessments from clinical settings to home environments, enhancing accessibility and patient autonomy. Future work involves validating these models with larger, more diverse populations and exploring additional mac
The long runtime associated with simulating multidisciplinary systems challenges the use of Bayesian optimization for multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO). This is particularly the case if the coupled system is modeled in a partitioned manner and feedback loops, known as strong coupling, are present. This work introduces a method for Bayesian optimization in MDO called "Multidisciplinary Design Optimization using Thompson Sampling", abbreviated as MDO-TS. Instead of replacing the whole system with a surrogate, we substitute each discipline with such a Gaussian process. Since an entire multidisciplinary analysis is no longer required for enrichment, evaluations can potentially be saved. However, the objective and associated uncertainty are no longer analytically estimated. Since most adaptive sampling strategies assume the availability of these estimates, they cannot be applied without modification. Thompson sampling does not require this explicit availability. Instead, Thompson sampling balances exploration and exploitation by selecting actions based on optimizing random samples from the objective. We combine Thompson sampling with an approximate sampling strategy that uses
Astrophysical observations of the cosmos allow us to probe extreme physics and answer foundational questions on our universe. Modern astronomy is increasingly operating under a holistic approach, probing the same question with multiple diagnostics including how sources vary over time, how they appear across the electromagnetic spectrum, and through their other signatures, including gravitational waves, neutrinos, cosmic rays, and dust on Earth. Astrophysical observations are now reaching the point where approximate physics models are insufficient. Key sources of interest are explosive transients, whose understanding requires multidisciplinary studies at the intersection of astrophysics, gravity, nuclear science, plasma physics, fluid dynamics and turbulence, computation, particle physics, atomic, molecular, and optical science, condensed matter and materials science, radiation transport, and high energy density physics. This white paper provides an overview of the major scientific advances that lay at the intersection of physics and astronomy and are best probed through time-domain and multimessenger astrophysics, an exploration of how multidisciplinary science can be fostered, and
What does Artificial Intelligence (AI) have to contribute to health care? And what should we be looking out for if we are worried about its risks? In this paper we offer a survey, and initial evaluation, of hopes and fears about the applications of artificial intelligence in medicine. AI clearly has enormous potential as a research tool, in genomics and public health especially, as well as a diagnostic aid. It's also highly likely to impact on the organisational and business practices of healthcare systems in ways that are perhaps under-appreciated. Enthusiasts for AI have held out the prospect that it will free physicians up to spend more time attending to what really matters to them and their patients. We will argue that this claim depends upon implausible assumptions about the institutional and economic imperatives operating in contemporary healthcare settings. We will also highlight important concerns about privacy, surveillance, and bias in big data, as well as the risks of over trust in machines, the challenges of transparency, the deskilling of healthcare practitioners, the way AI reframes healthcare, and the implications of AI for the distribution of power in healthcare ins
Respiratory motion limits the accuracy and precision of abdominal percutaneous procedures. In this paper, respiratory motion is compensated robotically using motion estimation models. Additionally, a teleoperated insertion is performed using proximity-based haptic feedback to guide physicians during insertion, enabling a radiation-free remote insertion for the end-user. The study has been validated using a robotic liver phantom, and five insertions were performed. The resulting motion estimation errors were below 3 mm for all directions of motion, and the overall resulting 3D insertion errors were 2.60, 7.75, and 2.86 mm for the superior-inferior, lateral, and anterior-posterior directions of motion, respectively. The proposed approach is expected to minimize the chances of inaccurate treatment or diagnosis due to respiratory-induced motion and reduce radiation exposure.
Respiratory disease, the third leading cause of deaths globally, is considered a high-priority ailment requiring significant research on identification and treatment. Stethoscope-recorded lung sounds and artificial intelligence-powered devices have been used to identify lung disorders and aid specialists in making accurate diagnoses. In this study, audio-spectrogram vision transformer (AS-ViT), a new approach for identifying abnormal respiration sounds, was developed. The sounds of the lungs are converted into visual representations called spectrograms using a technique called short-time Fourier transform (STFT). These images are then analyzed using a model called vision transformer to identify different types of respiratory sounds. The classification was carried out using the ICBHI 2017 database, which includes various types of lung sounds with different frequencies, noise levels, and backgrounds. The proposed AS-ViT method was evaluated using three metrics and achieved 79.1% and 59.8% for 60:40 split ratio and 86.4% and 69.3% for 80:20 split ratio in terms of unweighted average recall and overall scores respectively for respiratory sound detection, surpassing previous state-of-th
In recent years, several studies have tended to show a respiratory drive in numerous brain areas so that the respiratory rhythm could be considered as a master clock promoting communication between distant brain areas. However, outside of the olfactory system it is not known if respiration-related oscillation (RRo) could exist in the membrane potential (MP) of neurons neither if it can structure spiking discharge. To fill this gap, we co-recorded MP and LFP activities in different non-olfactory brain areas: median prefrontal cortex (mPFC), primary somatosensory cortex (S1), primary visual cortex (V1), and hippocampus (HPC), in urethane-anesthetized rats. Using respiratory cycle by respiratory cycle analysis, we observed that respiration could modulate both MP and spiking discharges in all recorded areas. Further quantifications revealed RRo episodes were transient in most neurons (5 consecutive cycles in average). RRo development in MP was largely influenced by the presence of respiratory modulation in the LFP. Finally, moderate hyperpolarization reduced RRo occurence within cells of mpFC and S1. By showing the respiratory rhythm influenced brain activity deep to the MP of non-olfa
The success of precision medicine requires computational models that can effectively process and interpret diverse physiological signals across heterogeneous patient populations. While foundation models have demonstrated remarkable transfer capabilities across various domains, their effectiveness in handling individual-specific physiological signals - crucial for precision medicine - remains largely unexplored. This work introduces a systematic pipeline for rapidly and efficiently evaluating foundation models' transfer capabilities in medical contexts. Our pipeline employs a three-stage approach. First, it leverages physiological simulation software to generate diverse, clinically relevant scenarios, particularly focusing on data-scarce medical conditions. This simulation-based approach enables both targeted capability assessment and subsequent model fine-tuning. Second, the pipeline projects these simulated signals through the foundation model to obtain embeddings, which are then evaluated using linear methods. This evaluation quantifies the model's ability to capture three critical aspects: physiological feature independence, temporal dynamics preservation, and medical scenario d