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Deep brain stimulation is an increasingly prevalent surgical option in the treatment of a multitude of neurological conditions, most notably Parkinson's disease. The development of a neurofeedback device is driven primarily by stimulator habituation, surgical risk factors, the cost of battery replacement, and reported neuropsychiatric side-effects under prolonged chronic administration. Here we present...
Nutrition is a critical aspect when getting older because bad nutrition habits can accelerate the process of degradation of the physical condition of the old person. In order to mitigate this problem, an Ambient Assisted Living service has been developed. Research with this service is focused on demonstrating that with an Ambient Intelligence systems it is possible to make the nutritional management...
In Japan, the number of elderly recipients who take medicines regularly has been increasing due to population aging. Since they have many risks of incorrect medication, we have developed the intelligent medicine case system (iMec System) for assisting their caretakers in medication monitoring. The system confirms the type, quantity and timing of medication every time a recipient picks medicines up...
Advances in medical devices and health care has been phenomenal during the recent years. Although medical device manufacturers have been improving their instruments, network connection of these instruments still rely on proprietary technologies. Even if the interface has been provided by the manufacturer (e.g., RS-232, USB, or Ethernet coupled with a proprietary API), there is no widely-accepted uniform...
Percutaneous nephrolithotomy (PCNL) for the treatment of renal stones and other related renal diseases has proved its efficacy and has stood the test of time compared with open surgical methods and extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy. However, access to the collecting system of the kidney is not easy because the available intra-operative image modalities only provide a two dimensional view of the...
Healthcare Development Framework (HDF) is a methodology of HL7 standard for development interoperability specifications in the healthcare. HDF was used in the process, artifacts and development of the information exchange messages. This paper presents a model of integration and interoperability process with information and communication technology (ICT) in emergency services, using the standard HL7...
Medical software management represents one of the biggest future challenge in healthcare. Technology level is actually waiting for appropriate normative and regulatory support by including maintenance, assistance and safety. This paper aims to highlight the critical aspects in medical software management and specifically to provide a methodology in order to support decision makers responsible for...
This paper presents two alternative approaches to characterize the pharmacodynamics of propofol anesthesia in children, using State Entropy as a clinical end point. The first approach is the traditional approach where the pharmacodynamic model is described in terms of an effect-site equilibration rate constant and the Hill equation. In the second approach (the monitor-decoupled approach) the dynamics...
The mechanical ventilator settings in patients with respiratory diseases like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) during episodes of acute respiratory failure (ARF) is not a simple task that in most cases is successful based on the experience of physicians. This paper describes an interactive tool based in mathematical models, developed to make easier the study of the interaction between...
Augmented Reality is a technology which provides people with more intuitive ways of interaction and visualization, close to those in real world. The amount of applications using Augmented Reality is growing every day, and results can be already seen in several fields such as Education, Training, Entertainment and Medicine. The system proposed in this article intends to provide a friendly and intuitive...
The correct needle placement is one of the crucial tasks in performing radiofrequency tumor ablation (RFA). In this work we evaluated the effects of imperfect needle placement for RFAs that are performed with an expandable needle array by using a finite-element simulation. We performed simulations for normal liver tissue with hypo- and hyperperfused metastasis as well as for cirrhotic liver tissue...
Previous studies have suggested that some graph properties of protein interaction networks might be related with gene morbidity. In particular, it has been suggested that when a polymorphism affects a gene, it is more likely to produce a disease if the node degree in the interaction network is higher than for other genes. However, these results do not take into account the possible bias introduced...
We present an approach to deriving very simple classification rules from microarray data by first selecting very small gene subsets that can ensure highly accurate classification of cancers. Finding such minimum gene subsets can greatly reduce the computational load and “noise” arising from irrelevant genes. The derived simple classification rules allow for accurate diagnosis without the need for...
Disease Management (DM) is a system of coordinated healthcare intervention and communications for populations with conditions in which patient self-care efforts are significant. e-DM makes reference to processes of DM based on clinical guidelines sustained in the scientific medical evidence and supported by the intervention of Information and Telecommunication Technology (ICT) in all levels where...
It has been demonstrated that negative emotions have adverse effects on the immune system of a person. This contributes to increased morbidity and mortality in the elderly population and has a direct impact on quality of life. Positive emotions on the other hand may not only undo the harmful effects of negative emotions but also protect against certain diseases. Hence the use of technology to facilitate...
Medical Decision Support Systems can provide assistance in crucial clinical judgments, particularly for inexperienced medical professionals. Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) is a soft computing technique for modeling complex systems following an approach similar to human reasoning and decision-making. FCMs successfully represent knowledge and human experience, introducing concepts to represent the essential...
The purpose of this study is to develop an automatic classifier based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to help the diagnostic of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) using forced oscillation measurements (FOT). The classifier inputs are the parameters provided by the FOT and the output is the indication if the parameters indicate COPD or not. The available dataset consists of 7 possible...
The understanding of how neurons interact in the visual cortex and what types of neurons are responsable for each interaction are still open questions. In order to analyse such problem, the spiking activity of neurons in the central visual pathway of awake owls was analyzed with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and clustering techniques. Further analysis using kernel representation revealed the...
Wall artery viscoelastic properties (WAVP) are correlated with structural and functional state of the arterial system. An accurate estimation of these properties is achieved measuring wall instantaneous diameter and pressure signals. The aim of this work was to evaluate a new non invasive estimation method of the instantaneous arterial diameter (D), and consequently, WAVP. Ten common carotid arteries...
Vertical ground reaction force (vGRF) has been commonly used in human gait analysis making possible the study of mechanical overloads in the locomotor system. This study aimed at applying the principal component (PC) analysis and two Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), multi-layer feed forward (FF) and self organized maps (SOM), for classifying and clustering gait patterns from normal subjects (CG)...
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