During 2016 my research aimed to conclude the proposal previously presented and including some new problems.

The collaboration on the integration of contributions in BioSigBrowser (BSB) toolbox, led by the Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain) - Biomedical Signal Interpretation & Computational Simulation (BSICoS) partners culminated in the integration of a new module related to long memory estimation and ARFIMA modeling developed at CMUP. With that purpose I made 10-days long working visit  to Universidad de Zaragoza. 

Ia have also colaborated with BSICoS regarding the validation of a heart rate monitor, resultin ia full publication [D. Hernando, David, N. Garatachea, Nuria; R. Almeida, J.A. Casajús, R. Bailón, Raquel (2016) “Validation of heart rate monitor Polar RS800 for heart rate variability analysis during exercise”, Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research doi: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000001662.]

The multilead strategy for electrocardiogram delineation previosly developed, which used projections to produced vectocardiographic (VCG) loop based leads for boundaries location,extendion to T and R peak locations proceededuring 2016 , in the framework of the collaboration with Universidad de Oriente, Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, specifically regarding the PhD of Maikel Noriega. The methodology was validated over a standard database. The new  method to estimate RespR from the same directions based in the VCG loop used to delineate, considering each fiducial point was concluded. The results comparing the results using each fiducial point and several ortogonalization strategies to construct the VCG loop were presented as a poster in the 38th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC’16) in August 2016 and published in the respective proceedings. The journal paper: “"Estimación del ritmo respiratorio a partir de la dirección multiderivación de la delineación de ECG". Maikel Noriega Alemán, Enrique J. Marañón Reyes, Rute Almeida, was also submitted to “Revista de Ingeniería Electrónica, Automática y Comunicaciones”, Cuba. An improved method by combining several fiducial points was also developed and validated. Results presented as a poster at Computing in Cardiology 2016 (11th to 14th September, Vancover, Canada) and published in the respective proceedings.

Heart rate variability (HRV ) analysis of data colected at Hospital S. João (Porto) from children prior and after surgery allowed to explore the autonomic changes and related with effects of surgery and residual anesthesic drugs. Results were published as a full paper at Journal of Anesthesia & Clinical Research [Silva MJ, Pinheiro R, Almeida R, Cunha F, Ribeiro A, et al. (2016) Heart Rate Variability in Children Submitted to Surgery. J Anesth Clin Res 7:688. doi: 10.4172/2155-6148.1000688].

The collaboration with Neurocritical intensive care unit of Centro Hospital S. João (Porto) allowed to initiate the collection of more general multimodal database of the critically ill adult patients, including traumatic brain lesion and brain death. A few cases of decompressive craniectomy HRV analysis using long memory and heterocedasticity models allowed to presenyt some preliminar results at the European Society Intensive Care Meeting ESICM LIVES 2016 1–5th October 2016, Milan, Italy. [ C. Dias, R. Almeida, A. Vaz-Ferreira, J. Silva, E. Monteiro, A. Cerejo, A.P. Rocha (2016) “Heart rate variability and multimodal brain monitoring before and after decompressive craniectomy in traumatic brain injury”, Intensive Care Med Exp. 2016 Sep; 4 (Suppl 1): 30. Published online 2016 Sep 29. doi:  10.1186/s40635-016-0099-9].