IJCNN Special Session on

Artificial Neural Networks for Healthcare and Bio-signals Analysis

Call for Papers

Due to the exponential increasing of healthcare costs and hospitalizations around the globe, there is a great deal of interest to enrich the effectiveness and accuracy of treatments. To this end, even more sophisticated technologies are present in medical systems. Specifically, innovative Artificial Intelligence techniques, mainly based on machine and deep learning (ML/DL), including Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), have been widely employed in healthcare and neural engineering research field, achieving very promising results.

ANN are computational paradigms, belonging to ML, based on mathematical models with the ability to autonomously learn relevant features by exploiting data, without the need of a specific programming step. ANNs consist of processing elementary nodes (artificial neurons) typically arranged in a hierarchical organization that resembles the organization of the mammalian brain.

The current Special Session intends to collect a set of contributions that can demonstrate the potential of ANN in the healthcare environment through practical and clinical applications. Articles reporting novel ideas on this exciting field are also welcomed. In particular, the Special Session intends to promote new approaches and algorithms able to process biomedical data (e.g., neuroimages, electrophysiological signals, etc ...) by using ANN based techniques. The hardware implementation of ANN-based processing architectures on clinical systems are also of interest for this special session.

Topics of interest for this Special Session include, but are not limited to:

• Artificial neural networks in biomedical engineering
• Artificial neural networks for electrophysiological data (EEG, ECG, EMG, ...)
• Artificial neural networks for medical images
• Artificial neural networks for computer-aided detection systems
• Exploring advanced ANN (i.e. Deep Neural Networks) in healthcare
• Generative adversarial networks (GANs) for health data (neuro-images, EEG, ECG, ..)
• Exploiting ensemble Machine Learning architectures to enhance classification performances
• Novel ANN approaches to process Big Clinical Data
• Real Time ANN for patients monitoring
• Unsupervised Learning Approaches for unlabeled data

Corresponding Special session Organizing Committee Member:

FRANCESCO CARLO MORABITO, University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria, Italy, e-mail: morabito@unirc.it
Short CV: Francesco Carlo Morabito (M’89 - SM’00) was the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Deputy Rector at the University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria, Reggio Calabria, Italy, where he is currently a Full Professor of Electrical Engineering and Neural Engineering. He is also serving as Vice-Rector for International and Institutional Relations. He has authored or co-authored over 400 papers in international journals/conference proceedings in various fields of engineering (radar data processing, nuclear fusion, biomedical signal processing, nondestructive testing and evaluation, machine learning, and computational intelligence). He has co-authored 15 books and holds three international patents. Prof. Morabito is a Foreign Member of the Royal Academy of Doctors, Spain, in 2004, and a member of the Institute of Spain, Barcelona Economic Network, in 2017. He served as the Governor of the International Neural Networks Society for 12 years and as the President of the Italian Neural Networks Society from 2008 to 2014. He is a member of the editorial boards of various international journals, including the International Journal of Neural Systems, Neural Networks, International Journal of Information Acquisition, and Renewable Energy.

Organizers (Biographies):

ANNA ESPOSITO, Università della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli” (UVA) Dipartimento di Psicologia, Italy, email: iiass.annaesp@tin.it.
Short CV: Anna Esposito (F) received her “Laurea Degree” summa cum laude in Information Technology and Computer Science from the Università di Salerno in 1989 with a thesis on: The Behavior and Learning of a Deterministic Neural Net (Complex System, 6(6), 507-517, 1992) and a Ph.D. Degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from the Università di Napoli “Federico II” in 1995. Her PhD thesis on: Vowel Height and Consonantal Voicing Effects: Data from Italian (Phonetica, 59(4), 197-231, 2002) was developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Research Laboratory of Electronics, under the supervision of professor Kenneth N Stevens. Anna is currently Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology, UVA. Her teaching/research interests include Cognitive and Algorithmic Issues of Multimodal Communication, Human Machine Emotional Interaction, Emotions, Cognitive Economy, and Decision Making. She authored 190+ peer reviewed publications in international journals, books, and conference proceedings. She edited/co-edited 28+ books/conference proceedings in collaboration with Italian, EU and overseas colleagues. She guest edited several journal special issues, among those the International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools (IJAIT, 2017), Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces (2015), The Information Society Journal (2015), Intelligent Decision Technologies (2014), Cognitive Computation (2014, 2012). Anna has been general chair and/or co-chair of 50+ international events organized as conferences and conference special sessions, among those IEEE-ICTAI 2015. She is doctoral chair for FG2019, and challenge chair for ICMI 2019.

EROS PASERO, Politecnico di Torino, Laboratorio di Neuronica, DET, Italy, email: eros.pasero@polito.it
Short CV: Eros G. Pasero is Professor of Electronics at the Politecnico of Turin since 1991. He has courses in Electronics Engineering and Artificial Neural Networks. He was also Visiting Professor at ICSI, UC Berkeley, CA in 1991, Professor of digital electronics and electronic systems at Tongji University, Shanghai, China in 2011, 2015 and 2017, and Professor of digital electronics and electronic systems at TTPU (Turin Tashkent Politechnic University), Tashkent, Uzbekistan since 2012 to 2014 where he was also vice rector in the first period of 2014. He was also visiting professor at Columbia University, Medical school, New York in 2018 and at California State University of Los Angeles, CA. Prof. Pasero interests lie in Artificial Neural Networks and Electronic Sensors. He created in 1990 the Neuronica Lab where hardware neurons and synapses are studied for neuromorphic approaches; neural software applications are applied to real life proof of concepts. Innovative wired and wireless sensors are also developed for biomedical, environmental, automotive applications. Data coming from sensors are post processed by means of artificial neural networks. Today his main interests deal with telemedicine. Wearable ECG sensors, remote patients control, venous ulcers remote diagnosis are his last applications. He is member of the technical committee of the joint Politecnico di Torino ASLTO1,2 and 3 agreement where he is developing a wearable ECG device for remote control of patients.

ROBERTO TAGLIAFERRI, Università degli studi di Salerno, DISA-MIS, Italy, email: robtag@unisa.it
Short CV: Roberto Tagliaferri is full professor in Computer Science at the University of Salerno. He has had courses in Computer Architectures, Artificial and Computational Intelligence, and Bioinformatics for computer scientists and engineers, and biologists. He has been co-organizer of international workshops and schools on Neural Nets, Computational Intelligence and Bioinformatics. He has been co-editor of special issues on international journals and of Proceedings of International conferences. His research activity has been oriented to Computational Intelligence models and applications in the areas of Astrophysics, Biomedicine, Bioinformatics, and Industrial Applications, with more than 150 publications. He is senior member of the IEEE "Computational Intelligence" and "System, Man and Cybernetics" societies and of INNS. He was chair of the Italy Chapter of the IEEE CIS from 2013 to 2017. He is Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, of BMC Bioinformatics and of Source Code in Medicine and Biology of Biomed Central, and he has been co-editor of special issues on international journals and of proceedings of international workshops in the areas of Computational Intelligence and Bioinformatics.

NADIA MAMMONE, Università Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria, email: nadia.mammone@unirc.it
Short CV: Nadia Mammone has been the Principal Investigator, at the IRCCS Centro Neurolesi Bonino-Pulejo in Messina (Italy), of a research project on advanced EEG processing, funded by the Italian Ministry of Health. Formerly, she was a Post-Doc Fellow in Biomedical and Electrical Engineering (2013-2015) at the DICEAM Department of the Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria (Italy). She received her PhD in Informatics, Biomedical and Telecommunications Engineering (2007) from the same University, with a dissertation that was awarded the Caianiello Prize from the Italian Neural Networks Society (SIREN). In the past years, she was Adjunct Professor of “Neural Networks and Fuzzy Systems” at the Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria, of “Electronics and Instrumentation for laboratories of Neurophysio-pathology” and of “Biomedical Signal Processing” at the Faculty of Medicine (University of Catanzaro, Italy). She was a visiting PhD Fellow at the Computational NeuroEngineering Laboratory (CNEL, University of Florida, USA) in 2005 and 2008 and a visiting Post-Doc Fellow at the Communication and Signal Processing Research Group (Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College, London, UK) in 2015. Her research interests include neural and adaptive systems, biomedical signal processing, information and complex network theory.

Important Dates:

• Paper Submission Deadline: 15 January 2020
• Paper Acceptance Notification Date: 15 March 2020
• Final Paper Submission and Early Registration: 15 April 2020
• IJCNN 2020: 19-24 July 2020

Submission:

Manuscripts intended for the special session should be submitted via the paper submission website of IJCNN 2020 as regular submissions. All papers submitted to special sessions will be subject to the same peer-review review procedure as the regular papers. Accepted papers will be part of the regular conference proceedings.

Links:

IEEE WCCI 2020 site: https://wcci2020.org/
Paper submission guidelines: https://wcci2020.org/calls/#call-for-papers