Multimodal Hemodynamic Monitoring, Data Analytics and Intelligent Modeling for Cardiovascular and Cerebrovascular Diseases

A special issue of Bioengineering (ISSN 2306-5354). This special issue belongs to the section "Biosignal Processing".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 January 2027 | Viewed by 2615

Editors


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Guest Editor
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, China
Interests: biomedical signal and image processing; artificial intelligence in biomedical engineering; smart medical devices; human hemodynamics; medical robotics

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Guest Editor
School of Nursing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China
Interests: artificial intelligence; deep learning; medical image analysis and segmentation; convolutional neural networks; computer vision; ultrasound imaging; virtual reality for medicine & healthcare applications
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Guest Editor
Laboratory for Engineering and Scientific Computing, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China
Interests: computer vision; pose estimation and tracking; 3D reconstruction; image segmentation

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Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Interests: Internet-of-Things (IoT); mobile computing; IoT security; wearables/AR/VR; low-power wide-area networks (LPWAN); mobile sensing; wireless networks; application of LLM (large language models) in IoT

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases remain leading causes of mortality and disability worldwide. Their onset and progression involve complex interactions among neurocardiovascular functions. For example, during an orthostatic challenge such as standing up, a sudden drop in arterial blood pressure can reduce cerebral perfusion. To prevent fainting, the brain and cardiovascular system respond rapidly through dynamic cerebral autoregulation, baroreflex activation, heart-rate adjustments, and changes in vascular tone. This illustrates how cerebral hemodynamics and cardiac regulation operate as an integrated neurocardiovascular network.

With recent advances in multimodal physiological monitoring and medical imaging technologies, combined with artificial intelligence and data-driven computational methods, researchers are now able to investigate brain–heart interactions across structural, functional, hemodynamic, and metabolic dimensions. Integrated analysis of multimodal signals provides new opportunities to understand key pathophysiological mechanisms, such as impaired cerebral autoregulation, intracranial pressure fluctuations, neurocardiac dysregulation, vascular stenosis, and cerebral hypoperfusion, which underlie various cardiovascular and cerebrovascular conditions. These approaches have shown significant value in stroke management, cardiogenic brain injury, atherosclerosis, atrial fibrillation-related perfusion changes, perioperative monitoring, and continuous neuro-monitoring in critical care.

This Special Issue focuses on multimodal hemodynamic monitoring, signal processing, mathematical modeling, and artificial intelligence with applications in cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. We welcome high-quality submissions, including original research and reviews.

Scope of the Special Issue

Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. Time-Series Physiological Monitoring Technologies:

- Electroencephalography (EEG), including scalp EEG, ECoG, and SEEG/intracranial EEG;
- Transcranial ultrasound, including transcranial doppler (TCD), transcranial color-coded duplex (TCCD), and transcranial ultrasound imaging;
- Electrocardiographic monitoring (ECG), including multi-lead ECG, Holter monitoring, and HRV analysis;
- Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), including CW-fNIRS, FD-NIRS, and TD-NIRS for cerebral blood flow and oxygenation;
- Continuous non-invasive blood pressure (cNIBP) and hemodynamic monitoring (CO, SVR, SV, and arterial stiffness);
- Polysomnography (EEG, EOG, EMG, airflow, respiratory effort, SpO2, pulse, and snoring signals);
- Development of related medical monitoring devices.

2. Medical Imaging and Biomedical Image Analysis:

- Cardiovascular and cerebrovascular image segmentation, reconstruction, and analysis;
- Multimodal fusion and AR technologies;
- Image-based robotic control for cardiovascular/neurovascular interventions;
- CFD modeling and hemodynamic simulation.

3. Artificial Intelligence and Clinical Data Analytics:

- Deep learning, time-series modeling, and predictive analytics.
- Multimodal ML for diagnosis, risk stratification, and prognosis.
- Reinforcement learning, large language models, and intelligent monitoring/decision support.

Prof. Dr. Jia Liu
Prof. Dr. Jing Qin
Dr. Chang Liu
Dr. Weitao Xu
Guest Editors

Dr. Jianhang Du
Guest Editor Assistant
Affiliation: The Eighth Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen, China
Website: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9678-082X
E-mail: dujh8@mail.sysu.edu.cn
Interests: human hemodynamics; pulse-wave propagation modelling; multiscale biomechanical modelling; patient-specific 3D hemodynamic simulation; noninvasive circulatory support devices

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Keywords

  • multimodal physiological monitoring
  • biomedical signal and image processing
  • computational human biomechanics
  • artificial intelligence in biomedicine
  • medical computing and robotics
  • computer vision in medicine

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

21 pages, 2937 KB  
Article
WAVE: Wall-Aligned Vector Embedding for Self-Supervised Learning of Electrocardiograms
by Shurong Pan, Wenhan Liu, Qingyuan Wu, Cong Wang and Zhaohui Yuan
Bioengineering 2026, 13(7), 733; https://doi.org/10.3390/bioengineering13070733 - 24 Jun 2026
Viewed by 298
Abstract
Deep learning has achieved remarkable progress in electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis, but its heavy dependence on labeled data greatly increases annotation cost. This work proposes wall-aligned vector embedding (WAVE), a self-supervised learning framework that effectively extracts prior knowledge from unlabeled ECGs to reduce reliance [...] Read more.
Deep learning has achieved remarkable progress in electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis, but its heavy dependence on labeled data greatly increases annotation cost. This work proposes wall-aligned vector embedding (WAVE), a self-supervised learning framework that effectively extracts prior knowledge from unlabeled ECGs to reduce reliance on labels. WAVE fully leverages the diversity, synergy, and lead correlation of multi-lead ECGs by explicitly incorporating the correspondence between ECG leads and cardiac walls. Specifically, a multi-branch network captures lead-wise diversity; wall-wise synergy is modeled by concatenating leads from the same wall and projecting them via shared projection; and a dual alignment task is designed to learn correlations both within and across cardiac walls. Experimental results demonstrate that WAVE consistently surpasses all baselines under various evaluation settings, and maintains strong performance even when only a small fraction of labeled ECGs is available. Furthermore, components such as dual alignment, shared projection, wall-based concatenation, and mean target embedding are empirically verified to significantly enhance pretraining quality. In summary, WAVE learns highly informative ECG representations from unlabeled data, enabling low-cost and label-efficient ECG analysis for real-world cardiovascular diagnostics. Full article
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11 pages, 230 KB  
Article
Long-Term External Counterpulsation Reduces Beat-to-Beat Blood Pressure Variability Without Changing Arterial Blood Pressure in Ischemic Stroke: A Retrospective Case-Control Study
by Lixia Zhu, Xinyi Chen, Xiaoling Li, Thomas W. Leung, Lawrence Ka Sing Wong, Jack Jiaqi Zhang, Yiao Liu, Bin Luo, Jianhang Du, Yiliang Li and Li Xiong
Bioengineering 2026, 13(5), 520; https://doi.org/10.3390/bioengineering13050520 - 29 Apr 2026
Viewed by 1700
Abstract
Background and purpose: Short-term external counterpulsation (ECP) noninvasively augments cerebral blood flow by elevating blood pressure in ischemic stroke. The current retrospective case–control study examined the effect of long-term ECP treatment on blood pressure and beat-to-beat blood pressure variability (BPV) in patients [...] Read more.
Background and purpose: Short-term external counterpulsation (ECP) noninvasively augments cerebral blood flow by elevating blood pressure in ischemic stroke. The current retrospective case–control study examined the effect of long-term ECP treatment on blood pressure and beat-to-beat blood pressure variability (BPV) in patients with recent ischemic stroke. Method: The ECP group included data from 20 recent ischemic stroke patients who received five daily 1 h sessions each week for seven weeks, for a total of 35 sessions of ECP treatment from our ECP registry. An equivalent comparative control group without ECP treatment was composed from the same pool of patients and matched with cases by sex and age. Beat-to-beat heart rate and blood pressure were monitored before and after the long-term intervention. Power spectral analysis calculated the beat-to-beat BPV oscillations at very low frequency (VLF; <0.04 Hz), low frequency (LF; 0.04–0.15 Hz), high frequency (HF; 0.15–0.40 Hz), and the total power spectral density (TP; <0.40 Hz) and LF/HF ratio. Result: There was a significant reduction in systolic blood pressure (SBP) after the intervention compared with that before intervention in both groups (p < 0.05), but only the ECP group displayed a statistically significant reduction in diastolic blood pressure (DBP) (p = 0.023). The changes in SBP and DBP (delta SBP and delta DBP) from pre-intervention to completion showed no significant differences between the two groups (all p > 0.05). The ECP group exhibited a more pronounced and significant decrease in each spectral component of BPV after the intervention than at pre-intervention, with a substantial decrease in systolic BPV at TP (p = 0.048) and in the LF/HF ratios (p = 0.021 in diastolic BPV and p = 0.004 in systolic BPV, respectively) compared to the control group. Conclusions: A standard 35-session ECP treatment decreases beat-to-beat BPV but does not change SBP and DBP in patients with recent ischemic stroke. This implies that long-term ECP treatment may enhance autonomic regulation to benefit post-stroke clinical outcomes. Full article
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