This paper reviews various nonlinear analysis methods for physiological signals. The assessment is based on a discussion of chaos-inspired methods, such as fractal dimension (FD), correlation dimension (D2), largest Lyapunov exponet (LLE), Renyi's entropy (REN), Shannon spectral entropy (SEN), and approximate entropy (ApEn). We document that these methods are used to extract discriminative features from electroencephalograph (EEG) and heart rate variability (HRV) signals by reviewing the relevant scientific literature. EEG features can be used to support the diagnosis of epilepsy and HRV features can be used to support the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases as well as diabetes. Documenting the widespread use of these and other nonlinear methods supports our thesis that the study of feature extraction methods, based on the chaos theory, is an important subject which has been gaining more and significance in biomedical engineering. We adopt the position that pursuing research in the field of biomedical engineering is ultimately a progmatic activity, where it is necessary to engage in features that work. In this case, the nonlinear features are working well, even if we do not have conclusive evidence that the underlying physiological phenomena are indeed chaotic.

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a rare type of blood cancer caused due to the overproduction of lymphocytes by the bone marrow in the human body. It is one of the common types of cancer in children, which has a fair chance of being cured. However, this may even occur in adults, and the chances of a cure are slim if diagnosed at a later stage. To aid in the early detection of this deadly disease, an intelligent method to screen the white blood cells is proposed in this study. The proposed intelligent deep learning algorithm uses the microscopic images of blood smears as the input data. This algorithm is implemented with a convolutional neural network (CNN) to predict the leukemic cells from the healthy blood cells. The custom ALLNET model was trained and tested using the microscopic images available as open-source data. The model training was carried out on Google Collaboratory using the Nvidia Tesla P-100 GPU method. Maximum accuracy of 95.54%, specificity of 95.81%, sensitivity of 95.91%, F1-score of 95.43%, and precision of 96% were obtained by this accurate classifier. The proposed technique may be used during the pre-screening to detect the leukemia cells during complete blood count (CBC) and peripheral blood tests.

Epilepsy is a common neurological disorder characterized by recurrence seizures. Alcoholism causes organic changes in the brain, resulting in seizure attacks similar to epileptic fits. Hence, it is challenging to differentiate the cause of fits as epileptic or alcoholism, which is important for deciding on the treatment in the neurology ward. The focus of this paper is to automatically differentiate epileptic, normal, and alcoholic electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. As the EEG signals are non-linear and dynamic in nature, it is difficult to tell the subtle changes in these signals with the help of linear techniques or by the naked eye. Therefore, to analyze the normal (control), epileptic, and alcoholic EEG signals, two non-linear methods, such as recurrence plots (RPs) and then recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) are adopted. Approximately 10 RQA parameters have been used to classify the EEG signals into three distinct classes, i.e., normal, epileptic, and alcoholic. Six classifiers, such as support vector machine (SVM), radial basis probabilistic neural network (RBPNN), decision tree (DT), Gaussian mixture model (GMM), k-nearest neighbor (kNN), and fuzzy Sugeno classifiers have been developed to accomplish this task. Results show that the GMM classifier outperformed the other classifiers with a classification sensitivity of 99.6%, specificity of 98.3%, and accuracy of 98.6%.

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