applied

sciences
Editorial
Special Issue: “Research on Biomedical Signal Processing”
Maurizio Varanini , Alessandro Tonacci * and Lucia Billeci

Institute of Clinical Physiology, National Research Council of Italy, via Moruzzi 1, 56124 Pisa, Italy;
[email protected] (M.V.); [email protected] (L.B.)
* Correspondence: [email protected]

Over recent years, the number of signals of a different type that can be acquired from
the human body has increased extraordinarily. In addition, the power of digital electronic
devices has exploded, making it possible to manage a complex multi-signal environment
capable of estimating multivariate time-variant models in real time. Finally, advances in
machine learning (ML) theory and the increased availability of large signal databases make
the application of deep learning feasible. We believe that the sum of these advancements
produces significant achievements in biomedical signal processing, supporting accurate
diagnosis and efficient medical decision making.
This Special Issue is intended to provide the reader with a collection of research articles
that represent examples of a wide and varied array of signals and methods of analysis.
With the development of wearable biomedical sensors, the number and duration of
biomedical signals have increased significantly, but random noise and external interference
affect most of them. Therefore, signal processing techniques have been applied to cancel
artifacts and reduce noise, increasing the signal quality for subsequent analysis. The
multisignal framework has been used to develop new artifact removal methods. One such
methods is artifact subspace reconstruction (ASR). To this end, the paper of Plechawska-
Wójcik et al. [1] evaluated the influence of ASR on EEG signals.
The paper of Bachi et al. [2] presented a high-computational-efficiency algorithm for QRS
complex detection that had been specifically designed for ECG analysis in wearable devices.
Ferdinando et al., in their paper [3], proposed continuous human cardiac monitoring
by analyzing signals from accelerometers placed on the chest.
De La Pava Panche et al. [4] estimated directed phase–amplitude interactions from
EEG data through kernel-based phase transfer entropy. Cross-frequency interactions, a
Citation: Varanini, M.; Tonacci, A.; form of oscillatory neural activity, are thought to play an essential role in the integration of
Billeci, L. Special Issue: “Research on distributed information in the brain. Indeed, phase–amplitude interactions are believed
Biomedical Signal Processing”. Appl. to allow for the transfer of information from large-scale brain networks oscillating at low
Sci. 2023, 13, 7347. https://doi.org/ frequencies, to local, rapidly oscillating neural assemblies.
10.3390/app13137347 Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is an attractive technology, especially in
Received: 7 June 2023
the field of neuroscience, on account of its non-invasiveness, portability, cost-effectiveness
Accepted: 12 June 2023 and long-term monitoring capability. However, to date, fNIRS has found limited clinical
Published: 21 June 2023 use due to poor spatial resolution, shallow penetration depth, lack of anatomical specificity
and low within-subject reproducibility.
Current fNIRS instrumentation provides nonstandard outputs, and objective stan-
dardization of preprocessing and analysis pipelines is required to construct homogeneous
Copyright: © 2023 by the authors. and standardized databases for application to clinical research. The paper authored by
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Bonilauri et al. [5] addressed this issue.
This article is an open access article Paternoster and Seiberl [6] compared five different approaches in estimating skeletal
distributed under the terms and muscle oxygen consumption using continuous-wave near-infrared Spectroscopy (CW-
conditions of the Creative Commons
NIRS). Repeated-measures ANOVA have identified significant differences among the five
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
oxygen consumption estimates, meaning that studies using different approaches are not
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
directly comparable.
4.0/).

Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 7347. https://doi.org/10.3390/app13137347 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci

In recent years, the scientific community has developed technologies for constructing
exoskeletal devices or prostheses to compensate for the motor deficits of people with
disabilities. The interfaces for controlling such robotic devices are mostly based on non-
invasive electromyographic (EMG) signaling. He et al. [7] proposed a musculoskeletal
model based on muscle synergy for the continuous estimation of hand and wrist motion.
To separate specific deep-muscle activation, the signals were analyzed using independent
component analysis (ICA) and non-negative matrix decomposition (NMF) was then applied
to extract muscle synergies.
Zuccalà et al. [8] reported on the use of some of the features extracted from physio-
logical signals (including heart rate, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, galvanic skin
response) to recognize stress in response to moderate cognitive activation in daily-life
settings. The relevance of the various features was investigated using two approaches:
sequential forward feature selection (SFFS) and auto-encoder (AE) neural networks. The
self-organizing map (SOM) method was used to provide a flexible representation of an
individual’s status. Vaz et al. [9] addressed the problem of predicting anxiety levels from
physiological signals collected without any emotional elicitation. Electrocardiogram (ECG),
electrodermal activity (EDA), and electromyogram (EMG) signals were considered. Fea-
tures extracted from the ECG were found to be the most relevant for anxiety classification.
Aresta et al. [10] combined biomechanical features and ML approaches to identify fencers’
levels. In order to determine the best classifier for the novice or élite athlete class, four
supervised models (extreme gradient boosting; multilayer perceptron (MLP); random
forest; support vector machine) were trained and tested on biomechanical data. The MLP
results identified it as the best model.
This Special Issue also includes two reviews. The first (Park and Kim [11]) concerns
the application of ML in the field of intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring (IONM)
as a diagnostic tool for the protection of patients from neural injury that may occur during
surgery, improving patient safety and minimizing neurological damage. Although the
application of ML to IONM remains limited, such an approach enables clinicians to perform
objective and reliable IONM.
The second review (Kumar and Ramachandran [12]) provides a comprehensive eval-
uation of compressive sensing (CS) research in biosignal compression, particularly in
one-dimensional ECG. In recent years, home patient monitoring devices have become more
and more common, something that has also required the acquisition and transmission of
larger amounts of biomedical data and signals to the care center server for remote anal-
ysis. This has resulted in huge data flows, making it pivotal to reduce such flows while
maintaining high accuracy of information.

Author Contributions: Conceptualization M.V.; methodology: M.V., A.T. and L.B.; data curation,
A.T and L.B; writing—original draft preparation, M.V.; writing—review and editing; A.T. and L.B.
All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding: This research received no external funding.
Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

References
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Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 7347 3 of 3

6. Paternoster, F.; Seiberl, W. Comparison of Different Approaches Estimating Skeletal Muscle Oxygen Consumption Using
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[CrossRef]
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