Muhammad Ali Rushdi

Analysis and classification of electromyography (EMG) signals are crucial for rehabilitation and motor control. This study investigates electromyogram (EMG) time-frequency representations and then creates conventional and deep learning models for EMG signal classification. Firstly, a dataset of single-channel surface EMG signals has been recorded for four subjects to differentiate between forearm flexion and extension. Then, different time-frequency EMG representations have been used to build conventional and deep learning models for EMG classification. We compared the performance of pre-trained convolutional neural network models, namely GoogLeNet, SqueezeNet and AlexNet, and achieved accuracies of 92.71%, 90.63% and 87.5%, respectively. Also, data augmentation techniques on the levels of raw EMG signals and their time- frequency representations helped improve the accuracy of GoogLeNet to 96.88%. Furthermore, our approach demonstrated superior performance on another publicly available 10-class EMG dataset, and also using traditional classifiers trained on hand-crafted features.

Melanoma is the most fatal type of skin cancer. Detection of melanoma from dermoscopic images in an early stage is critical for improving survival rates. Numerous image processing methods have been devised to discriminate between melanoma and benign skin lesions. Previous studies show that the detection performance depends significantly on the skin lesion image representations and features. In this work, we propose a melanoma detection approach that combines graph-theoretic representations with conventional dermoscopic image features to enhance the detection performance. Instead of using individual pixels of skin lesion images as nodes for complex graph representations, superpixels are generated from the skin lesion images and are then used as graph nodes in a superpixel graph. An edge of such a graph connects two adjacent superpixels where the edge weight is a function of the distance between feature descriptors of these superpixels. A graph signal can be defined by assigning to each graph node the output of some single-valued function of the associated superpixel descriptor. Features are extracted from weighted and unweighted graph models in the vertex domain at both local and global scales and in the spectral domain using the graph Fourier transform (GFT). Other features based on color, geometry and texture are extracted from the skin lesion images. Several conventional and ensemble classifiers have been trained and tested on different combinations from those features using two datasets of dermoscopic images from the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) archive. The proposed system achieved an AUC of [Formula: see text], an accuracy of [Formula: see text], a specificity of [Formula: see text] and a sensitivity of [Formula: see text].