Data Fusion Techniques and Applications for Smart Healthcare

Medical data exists in several formats, from structured data and medical reports to 1D signals, 2D images, 3D volumes, or even higher dimensional data such as temporal 3D sequences. Healthcare experts can make auscultation reports in text format; electrocardiograms can be printed in time series format, x-rays saved as images; volume can be provided through angiography; temporal information by echocardiograms, and 4D information extracted through flow MRI. Another typical source of variability is the existence of data from different time points, such as pre and post treatment, for instance. These large and highly diverse amounts of information need to be organized and mined in an appropriate way so that meaningful information can be extracted. New multimodal data fusion techniques are able to combine salient information into one single source to ensure better diagnostic accuracy and assessment. Data Fusion Techniques and Applications for Smart Healthcare covers cutting-edge research from both academia and industry with a particular emphasis on recent advances in algorithms and applications that involve combining multiple sources of medical information. This book can be used as a reference for practicing engineers, scientists, and researchers. It will also be useful for graduate students and practitioners from government and industry as well as healthcare technology professionals working on state-of-the-art information fusion solutions for healthcare applications.