No abstract

Baseline correction is one of the pre-processing steps in the analysis of metabolite signals from chemometric analytical instruments. Fully automated baseline correction techniques, although more convenient to use, tend to be less accurate than semi-automated baseline correction. A fully automated baseline correction algorithm, the automated iterative moving averaging algorithm (AIMA), is presented and compared with three recently introduced semi-automated algorithms, namely the adaptive iteratively reweighted penalized least squares (airPLS), Asymmetric Least Squares baseline correction (ALS) and a parametric method, using NMR, Raman and HPLC chromatograms. AIMA's potential in increasing the accuracy of multivariate analysis via SELTI-TOF and LCMS chromatograms was also assessed. The results show that the AIMA's accuracy is comparable to these semi-automated algorithms and has the advantage of ease of use. An AIMA plug-in for an open source metabolomics analysis tool, MZmine, was also developed. The AIMA plug-in is available at http://padel.nus.edu.sg/software/padelaima.

Safety is a critical aspect in all swimming pools. This paper describes a near-drowning early prediction technique using novel equations (NEPTUNE). NEPTUNE uses equations or rules that would be able to detect near-drowning using at least 1 but not more than 5 seconds of video sequence with no false positives. The backbone of NEPTUNE encompasses a mix of statistical image processing to merge images for a video sequence followed by K-means clustering to extract segments in the merged image and finally a revisit to statistical image processing to derive variables for every segment. These variables would be used by the equations to identify near-drowning. NEPTUNE has the potential to be integrated into a swimming pool camera system that would send an alarm to the lifeguards for early response so that the likelihood of recovery is high.

A fully automated and computationally efficient Pearson's correlation change classification (APC3) approach is proposed and shown to have overall comparable performance with both an average accuracy and an average AUC of 0.89 ± 0.08 but is 3.9 to 7 times faster, easier to use and have low outlier susceptibility in contrast to other dimensional reduction and classification combinations using only the total ion chromatogram (TIC) intensities of GC/MS data. The use of only the TIC permits the possible application of APC3 to other metabonomic data such as LC/MS TICs or NMR spectra. A RapidMiner implementation is available for download at http://padel.nus.edu.sg/software/padelapc3.