Addi"ional informa"ion is available a" "he end of "he chap"er h""p://dx.doi.org/10.5772/56135 . IntroductionThere are several techniques for measuring brain activities such as magnetoencephalogram MEG , near infrared spectroscopy NIRS , electrocorticogram ECoG , functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI , and electroencephalography EEG . Each technique has some advantages and disadvantages compared to other techniques. For example, in EEG the temporal resolution is high but the special resolution is low compared to fMRI. "ecause of low cost and portability, EEG has been largely used in both clinical and researchOne of the EEG research applications is in a brain computer interface "CI system. " "CI can provide a new way of communications for special users who cannot communicate via normal pathways. " "CI system can send commands, controlled by brain activity and distinguished by EEG signal processing. There are many features which can be extracted from EEG, for example, six brain rhythms can be distinguished in EEG based on the differences in frequency ranges delta -Hz , theta -Hz , alpha -Hz , mu -Hz , beta -Hz , and gamma -Hz . The delta and theta rhythms occur in high emotional conditions or in a sleep stage. The alpha rhythm happens in awake and eyes closed relax condition. The oscillation in alpha rhythm has smooth pattern. The beta rhythm pattern is desynchronized and the condition is the normal awake open eyes. The gamma rhythm can be acquired from somatosensory cortex and mu rhythm from sensorimotor cortex. This is an open access ar"icle dis"rib""ed "nder "he "erms of "he Crea"ive Commons A""rib""ion License (h""p://crea"ivecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permi"s "nres"ric"ed "se, dis"rib""ion, and reprod"c"ion in any medi"m, provided "he original work is properly ci"ed. cal potentials SCPs [ ][ ].The focus of this chapter is on P , SSVEP and hybrid P -SSVEP "CI systems.Compared to other modalities for "CI approaches, such as the P -based and the SCP "CIs, SSVEP-based "CI system has the advantage of having higher accuracy and higher information transfer rate ITR . In addition, short/no training time and fewer EEG channels are required. However, similar to other "CI modalities, most current SSVEP-based "CI techniques also face some challenges that prevent them from being accepted by the majority of the population. Two important features of each "CI system are information transfer rate and required training time. " general comparison of different "CI approaches is shown in Figure .

Pupillary light reflex (PLR) is an involuntary response where the pupil size changes with luminance. Studies have shown that PLR response was altered in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and other neurological disorders. However, PLR in infants and toddlers is still understudied. We conducted a longitudinal study to investigate PLR in children of 6-24 months using a remote pupillography device. The participants are categorized into two groups. The 'high risk' (HR) group includes children with one or more siblings diagnosed with ASDs; whereas the 'low risk' (LR) group includes children without an ASD diagnosis in the family history. The participants' PLR was measured every six months until the age of 24 months. The results indicated a significant age effect in multiple PLR parameters including resting pupil radius, minimal pupil radius, relative constriction, latency, and response time. In addition, the HR group had a significantly larger resting and minimal pupil size than the LR group. The experimental data acquired in this study revealed not only general age-related PLR changes in infants and toddlers, but also different PLRs in children with a higher risk of ASD. Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) are complicated disorders that are marked by persistent deficits in social communication and interactions and by restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests or activities 1. Initially chronicled 75 years ago 2 , ASDs now affect about 2.47% children and adolescents in USA alone 3. Although the etiology of ASD is still not fully understood, our understanding of this disorder has since been significantly improved owing to a large amount of physiological, psychological, and neurological studies. Evidence supports that the outcome in children with ASDs can be greatly improved by using early behavioral intervention 4,5. Unfortunately, most children do not receive an ASD diagnosis until after the age of four 6 , although early signs may appear as young as 12 months of age 7. Therefore, there is a great interest in finding effective biological markers for early screening of risk of autism and assessing responses to interventions. Pupillary light reflex (PLR) is the involuntary and nearly instantaneous pupil size change that occurs as a response to the luminous intensity of light that falls on the retina. The pupil size is controlled by the dilator and sphincter muscles innervated primarily by the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), respectively 8. In 1961, Rubin observed that the pupils in 7 to 12 years old children with ASD constricted slower in responses to light adaption compared to typically developing children 9. Using a computerized pupillography system, Fan et al. discovered that pupils of children with ASD took a greater amount of time to respond to short (0.1 s) light stimuli and constricted less and more slowly than those with typical development 10. Similar atypical PLR responses were also reported in subsequent studies in children with ASD of diffe...

Sperm motility analysis has a particular place in male fertility diagnosis. Computerized sperm tracking has an important role in extracting sperm trajectory and measuring sperm's dynamic features. Due to free movements of sperms in three dimensions, occlusion has remained a challenging problem in this area. This paper aims to present a robust single sperm tracking method being able to handle misdetections in sperm occlusion scenes. In this paper, a robust method of segmentation was utilized to provide the required measurements for a switchable weight particle filtering which was designed for single sperm tracking. In each frame, the target sperm was categorized in one of these three stages: before occlusion, occlusion, and after occlusion where the occlusion had been detected based on sperm's physical characteristics. Depending on the target sperm stage, particles were weighted differently. In order to evaluate the algorithm, two groups of samples were studied where an expert had selected a single sperm of each sample to track manually and automatically. In the first group, the sperms with no occlusion along their trajectories were tracked to depict the general compatibility of the algorithm with sperm tracking. In the second group, the algorithm was applied on the sperms which had at least one occlusion during their path. The algorithm showed an accuracy of 95% on the first group and 86.66% on the second group which illustrate the robustness of the algorithm against occlusion.

In this study, we present a neuro-fuzzy approach of seizure prediction from invasive Electroencephalogram (EEG) by applying adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS). Three nonlinear seizure predictive features were extracted from a patient's data obtained from the European Epilepsy Database, one of the most comprehensive EEG database for epilepsy research. A total of 36 hours of recordings including 7 seizures was used for analysis. The nonlinear features used in this study were similarity index, phase synchronization, and nonlinear interdependence. We designed an ANFIS classifier constructed based on these features as input. Fuzzy if-then rules were generated by the ANFIS classifier using the complex relationship of feature space provided during training. The membership function optimization was conducted based on a hybrid learning algorithm. The proposed method achieved highest sensitivity of 80% with false prediction rate as low as 0.46 per hour.

No abstract