António Dourado

Tiago Leal, Antonio Dourado, Fabio Lopes et al.

The time series captured by a single scalp electrode (plus the reference electrode) of refractory epileptic patients is used to forecast seizures susceptibility. The time series is preprocessed, segmented, and each segment transformed into an image, using three different known methods: Recurrence Plot, Gramian Angular Field, Markov Transition Field. The likelihood of the occurrence of a seizure in a future predefined time window is computed by averaging the output of the softmax layer of a CNN, differently from the usual consideration of the output of the classification layer. By thresholding this likelihood, seizure forecasting has better performance. Interestingly, for almost every patient, the best threshold was different from 50%. The results show that this technique can predict with good results for some seizures and patients. However, more tests, namely more patients and more seizures, are needed to better understand the real potential of this technique.

Tiago Leal, Fabio Lopes, Cesar Teixeira et al.

Refractory epileptic patients can suffer a seizure at any moment. Seizure prediction would substantially improve their lives. In this work, based on scalp EEG and its transformation into images, the likelihood of an epileptic seizure occurring at any moment is computed using an average of the softmax layer output (the likelihood) of a CNN, instead of the output of the classification layer. Results show that by analyzing the likelihood and thresholding it, prediction has higher sensitivity or a lower FPR/h. The best threshold for the likelihood was higher than 50% for 5 patients, and was lower for the remaining 36. However, more testing is needed, especially in new seizures, to better assess the real performance of this method. This work is a proof of concept with a positive outlook.

Edgar D. Coelho, Igor N. Cruz, André Santiago et al.

The worldwide surge of multiresistant microbial strains has propelled the search for alternative treatment options. The study of Protein-Protein Interactions (PPIs) has been a cornerstone in the clarification of complex physiological and pathogenic processes, thus being a priority for the identification of vital components and mechanisms in pathogens. Despite the advances of laboratorial techniques, computational models allow the screening of protein interactions between entire proteomes in a fast and inexpensive manner. Here, we present a supervised machine learning model for the prediction of PPIs based on the protein sequence. We cluster amino acids regarding their physicochemical properties, and use the discrete cosine transform to represent protein sequences. A mesh of classifiers was constructed to create hyper-specialised classifiers dedicated to the most relevant pairs of molecular function annotations from Gene Ontology. Based on an exhaustive evaluation that includes datasets with different configurations, cross-validation and out-of-sampling validation, the obtained results outscore the state-of-the-art for sequence-based methods. For the final mesh model using SVM with RBF, a consistent average AUC of 0.84 was attained.