Rehabilitation is the process of treating post-stroke consequences. Impaired limbs are considered the common outcomes of stroke, which require a professional therapist to rehabilitate the impaired limbs and restore fully or partially its function. Due to the shortage in the number of therapists and other considerations, researchers have been working on developing robots that have the ability to perform the rehabilitation process. During the last two decades, different robots were invented to help in rehabilitation procedures. This paper explains the types of rehabilitation treatments and robot classifications. In addition, a few examples of well-known rehabilitation robots will be explained in terms of their efficiency and controlling mechanisms.

The objective detection of muscle fatigue reports the moment at which a muscle fails to sustain the required force. Such a detection prevents any further injury to the muscle following fatigue. However, the objective detection of muscle fatigue still requires further investigation. This paper presents an algorithm that employs a new fatigue index for the objective detection of muscle fatigue using a double-step binary classifier. The proposed algorithm involves analyzing the acquired sEMG signals in both the time and frequency domains in a double-step investigation. The first step involves calculating the value of the integrated EMG (IEMG) to determine the continuous contraction of the muscle being investigated. It was found that the IEMG value continued to increase with prolonged muscle contraction and progressive fatigue. The second step involves differentiating between the high-frequency components (HFC) and low-frequency components (LFC) of the EMG, and calculating the fatigue index. Basically, the segmented EMG signal was filtered by two band-pass filters separately to produce two sub-signals, namely, a high-frequency sub-signal (HFSS) and a low-frequency sub-signal (LFSS). Then, the instantaneous mean amplitude (IMA) was calculated for the two sub-signals. The proposed algorithm indicates that the IMA of the HFSS tends to decrease during muscle fatigue, while the IMA of the LFSS tends to increase. The fatigue index represents the difference between the IMA values of the LFSS and HFSS, respectively. Muscle fatigue was found to be present and was objectively detected when the value of the proposed fatigue index was equal to or greater than zero. The proposed algorithm was tested on 75 EMG signals that were extracted from 75 middle deltoid muscles. The results show that the proposed algorithm had an accuracy of 94.66% in distinguishing between conditions of muscle fatigue and non-fatigue.

Breast cancer is one of the leading reason of death among women. Nevertheless, medications for this fatal disease are still away of ambitions. Patients (thought to have breast cancer) should go through several advanced medical diagnostic procedures like mammography, biopsy analysis, ultrasound imaging, etc. Mammography is one of the medical imaging techniques used for detecting breast cancer. However, its resulted images may not be clear enough or helpful for physician to diagnose each case correctly. This fact has pushed researchers towards developing effective ways to enhance images throughout using various enhancement algorithms. In this paper, a comparison amongst these applied algorithms was done to evaluate the optimum enhancement technique. A morphology enhancement, which is resulted from combining top-hat operation and bottom-hat operation, was used as a proposed enhancement algorithm. The proposed enhancement algorithm was compared to three other well-known enhancement algorithms, specifically histogram equalization, logarithmic transform, and gamma correction with different gamma values. Twenty-five mammographic images were taken from the mammography image analysis society (MIAS) database samples. The minimum entropy difference value (EDV) was used as metric to evaluate the best enhancement algorithm. Results has approved that the proposed enhancement algorithm gave the best-enhanced images in comparison to the aforementioned algorithms.

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