Seizure prediction through scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) holds considerable practical potential. The primary challenge faced by existing algorithms lies in the individual heterogeneity, which hinders the generalizability of models to new patients. Additionally, inconsistencies in channel settings across various epilepsy centers further limit the applicability of models to diverse datasets. To address these challenges, we incorporate large language models (LLMs) into EEG analysis and propose a novel seizure prediction method based on LLMs (SPLLM), significantly enhancing both model generalizability and applicability. Specifically, this approach reprograms LLMs by transforming EEG signals into textual representations compatible with LLMs via a single-channel pre-training strategy. The method integrates cross-domain knowledge from both text and EEG data through a cross-attention mechanism, utilizing autoregressive pretrained LLMs to capture the temporal dependencies inherent in EEG signals. Moreover, the cross-domain generalization ability of LLMs alleviates patient heterogeneity, while the single-channel pre-training strategy enables the model to adapt to diverse channel settings. On two public datasets and one private dataset, SPLLM increases the average AUC by 8.2%, and the average balanced accuracy by 8.4% compared to existing methods. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method not only enhances cross-patient prediction accuracy but also adapts to data from different datasets, offering a scalable solution for the clinical application of seizure prediction.

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are vital in understanding brain activity, but their weak amplitude makes them susceptible to various artifacts. Accurate denoising of EEG data is crucial as a preprocessing step to ensure precise analysis and interpretation. In recent years, the diffusion model has garnered significant attention as a promising approach in generative modeling. This model effectively addresses the issue of over-smoothing in existing deep learning methods and thus has the potential to generate more refined denoised EEG signals. However, the generation process of the standard diffusion model is highly random, limiting its direct application to EEG denoising tasks. To address this limitation, we propose a conditional diffusion model specifically designed for EEG denoising. In this model, the standard diffusion model's denoising network is replaced by a novel dual-branch network, where noisy EEG information is used as a condition to guide the generation of corresponding clean EEG signals. This dual-branch structure leverages the complementary strengths of convolutional neural network (CNN) and Transformer architectures, integrating multi-scale features to comprehensively extract information from the signal. Extensive experiments demonstrate the remarkable performance of EEGDfus in EEG denoising. We tested it on two public datasets. Testing on two public datasets, EEGdenoiseNet and SSED, demonstrated that after denoising, the average correlation coefficient increased to 0.983 and 0.992 for EOG artifact removal, respectively. The proposed model outperforms commonly used baseline models, setting a new state-of-the-art benchmark in the field of EEG denoising.

Electroencephalography (EEG) signals are often contaminated with various physiological artifacts, seriously affecting the quality of subsequent analysis. Therefore, removing artifacts is an essential step in practice. As of now, deep learning-based EEG denoising methods have exhibited unique advantages over traditional methods. However, they still suffer from the following limitations. The existing structure designs have not fully taken into account the temporal characteristics of artifacts. Meanwhile, the existing training strategies usually ignore the holistic consistency between denoised EEG signals and authentic clean ones. To address these issues, we propose a GAN guided parallel CNN and transformer network, named GCTNet. The generator contains parallel CNN blocks and transformer blocks to respectively capture local and global temporal dependencies. Then, a discriminator is employed to detect and correct the holistic inconsistencies between clean and denoised EEG signals. We evaluate the proposed network on both semi-simulated and real data. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that GCTNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art networks in various artifact removal tasks, as evidenced by its superior objective evaluation metrics. For example, in the task of removing electromyography artifacts, GCTNet achieves 11.15% reduction in RRMSE and 9.81% improvement in SNR over other methods, highlighting the potential of the proposed method as a promising solution for EEG signals in practical applications.

Electroencephalography (EEG) has gained popularity in various types of biomedical applications as a signal source that can be easily acquired and conveniently analyzed. However, owing to a complex scalp electrical environment, EEG is often polluted by diverse artifacts, with electromyography artifacts being the most difficult to remove. In particular, for ambulatory EEG devices with a restricted number of channels, dealing with muscle artifacts is a challenge. In this study, we propose a simple but effective novel scheme that combines singular spectrum analysis (SSA) and canonical correlation analysis (CCA) algorithms for single-channel problems and then extend it to a fewchannel case by adding additional combining and dividing operations to channels. We evaluated our proposed framework on both semi-simulated and real-life data and compared it with some state-of-theart methods. The results demonstrate this novel framework's superior performance in both single-channel and few-channel cases. This promising approach, based on its effectiveness and low time cost, is suitable for real-world biomedical signal processing applications.

We present a feature-free photogrammetric technique that enables quantitative 3D mesoscopic (mm-scale height variation) imaging with tens-of-micron accuracy from sequences of images acquired by a smartphone at close range (several cm) under freehand motion without additional hardware. Our end-to-end, pixel-intensity-based approach jointly registers and stitches all the images by estimating a coaligned height map, which acts as a pixel-wise radial deformation field that orthorectifies each camera image to allow plane-plus-parallax registration. The height maps themselves are reparameterized as the output of an untrained encoder-decoder convolutional neural network (CNN) with the raw camera images as the input, which effectively removes many reconstruction artifacts. Our method also jointly estimates both the camera’s dynamic 6D pose and its distortion using a nonparametric model, the latter of which is especially important in mesoscopic applications when using cameras not designed for imaging at short working distances, such as smartphone cameras. We also propose strategies for reducing computation time and memory, applicable to other multi-frame registration problems. Finally, we demonstrate our method using sequences of multi-megapixel images captured by an un-stabilized smartphone on a variety of samples (e.g., painting brushstrokes, circuit board, seeds).

Robotic automation has the potential to assist human surgeons in performing suturing tasks in microsurgery, and in order to do so a robot must be able to guide a needle with sub-millimeter precision through soft tissue. This paper presents a robotic suturing system that uses 3D optical coherence tomography (OCT) system for imaging feedback. Calibration of the robot-OCT and robot-needle transforms, wound detection, keypoint identification, and path planning are all performed automatically. The calibration method handles pose uncertainty when the needle is grasped using a variant of iterative closest points. The path planner uses the identified wound shape to calculate needle entry and exit points to yield an evenly-matched wound shape after closure. Experiments on tissue phantoms and animal tissue demonstrate that the system can pass a suture needle through wounds with 0.200 mm overall accuracy in achieving the planned entry and exit points, and over 20× more precise than prior autonomous suturing robots.

Ophthalmic microsurgery is technically difficult because the scale of required surgical tool manipulations challenge the limits of the surgeon's visual acuity, sensory perception, and physical dexterity. Intraoperative optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging with micrometer-scale resolution is increasingly being used to monitor and provide enhanced real-time visualization of ophthalmic surgical maneuvers, but surgeons still face physical limitations when manipulating instruments inside the eye. Autonomously controlled robots are one avenue for overcoming these physical limitations. We demonstrate the feasibility of using learning from demonstration and reinforcement learning with an industrial robot to perform OCT-guided corneal needle insertions in an ex vivo model of deep anterior lamellar keratoplasty (DALK) surgery. Our reinforcement learning agent trained on ex vivo human corneas, then outperformed surgical fellows in reaching a target needle insertion depth in mock corneal surgery trials. This work shows the combination of learning from demonstration and reinforcement learning is a viable option for performing OCT guided robotic ophthalmic surgery.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has found great success in ophthalmology where it plays a key role in screening and diagnostics. Clinical ophthalmic OCT systems are typically deployed as tabletop instruments that require chinrest stabilization and trained ophthalmic photographers to operate. These requirements preclude OCT diagnostics in bedbound or unconscious patients who cannot use a chinrest, and restrict OCT screening to ophthalmology offices. We present a robotically-aligned OCT scanner capable of automatic eye imaging without chinrests. The scanner features eye tracking from fixed-base RGB-D cameras for coarse and stereo pupil cameras for fine alignment, as well as galvanometer aiming for fast lateral tracking, reference arm adjustment for fast axial tracking, and a commercial robot arm for slow lateral and axial tracking. We demonstrate the system's performance autonomously aligning with stationary eyes, pursuing moving eyes, and tracking eyes undergoing physiologic motion. The system demonstrates sub-millimeter eye tracking accuracy, 12 μm lateral pupil tracking accuracy, 83.2 ms stabilization time following step disturbance, and 9.7 Hz tracking bandwidth.