In this study, fetal heart rate signal is used to exemplify the performance of compression and entropy based approaches in biometric identification. A total of 167 pairs of traces from real fetus are analyzed under the popular normalized compression distance, the recently proposed normalized relative compression measure and mutual information measure. The best performance was achieved with the normalized compression distance resulting in a misclassification rate of 12%. Fetal heart rate could be a relevant feature for biometric identification models, namely in multiple pregnancies.

Abstract Motivation: Ebola virus causes high mortality hemorrhagic fevers, with more than 25 000 cases and 10 000 deaths in the current outbreak. Only experimental therapies are available, thus, novel diagnosis tools and druggable targets are needed. Results: Analysis of Ebola virus genomes from the current outbreak reveals the presence of short DNA sequences that appear nowhere in the human genome. We identify the shortest such sequences with lengths between 12 and 14. Only three absent sequences of length 12 exist and they consistently appear at the same location on two of the Ebola virus proteins, in all Ebola virus genomes, but nowhere in the human genome. The alignment-free method used is able to identify pathogen-specific signatures for quick and precise action against infectious agents, of which the current Ebola virus outbreak provides a compelling example. Availability and Implementation: EAGLE is freely available for non-commercial purposes at http://bioinformatics.ua.pt/software/eagle. Contact: [email protected]; [email protected] Supplementary Information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

An agglomerative hierarchical clustering method, which uses both spectral and spatial information for the aggregation decision, is proposed here. The method is suitable for large multispectral images, provided that an unsupervised classification is previously applied. The method is tested on a synthetic image and on a satellite image of the coastal zone.