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Current methods for assessing the efficacy of treatments for Parkinson's disease (PD) rely on physician rated scores. These methods pose three major shortcomings: 1) the subjectivity of the assessments, 2) the lack of precision on the rating scale (6 discrete levels), and 3) the inability to assess symptoms except under very specific conditions and/or for very specific tasks. To address these shortcomings,...
Sample Entropy (SampEn) is a nonlinear regularity index that requires the a priori selection of three parameters: the length of the sequences to be compared, m, the patterns similarity tolerance, r, and the number of samples under analysis, N. Appropriate values for m, r and N have been recommended in some cases, such as heart rate, hormonal data, etc., but no guidelines exist for the selection of...
Sleep science and respiratory engineering as medical subspecialties and research areas grew up side-by-side with biomedical engineering. The formation of EMBS in the 1950's and the discovery of REM sleep in the 1950's led to parallel development and interaction of sleep and biomedical engineering in diagnostics and therapeutics.
Interdisciplinary research towards integrated systems and their applications based on emerging convergence of information & communication technologies, micro-nano and bio technologies is expected to have a direct impact in healthcare, ageing population and well being. Micro-Nano-Bio Systems (MNBS) research and development activities under the European Union's R&D Programs, Information &...
Point-of-care diagnostic devices typically require six distinct qualities: they must deliver at least the same sensitivity and selectivity, and for a cost per assay no greater than that of today's central lab technologies, deliver results in a short period of time (<;15 min at GP; <;2h in hospital), be portable or at least small in scale, and require no or extremely little sample preparation...
We present a new type of non-contact sensor for use in ambulatory cardiac monitoring. The sensor operation is based on a microwave Doppler technique; however, instead of detecting the heart activity from a distance, the sensor is placed on the patient's chest over the clothing. The microwave sensor directly measures heart movement rather than electrical activity, and is thus complementary to ECG....
Silicosis is a typical occupational respiratory disease characterized by irreversible alterations throughout the alveolar and interstitial structure. The objectives of this study were (1) investigate the potential of the Forced Oscillation Technique (FOT) in the analysis of the patients with silicosis, and (2) evaluate the ability of FOT to identify early alterations in the respiratory mechanics of...
This study presents a simple decision-support system for the detection of tic events during the Tourette Syndrome (TS). The system is based on a triaxial accelerometer placed on the patient's trunk. TS is a neurological disorder that emerges during childhood and that is characterized by a large spectrum of involuntary/compulsive movements and sounds. 12 subjects with chronic TS participated in the...
The aim of this paper is to present a new noninvasive method for investigating the homogeneity of the thyroid gland geometric model. The amplitude of reflected signal depends on the shape, size and homogeneity of the object investigated acoustic as well as the signal frequency emitted by generator. The eigenvalues proportional to the resonance frequencies are obtained by using finite element method...
The study of the intestinal interdigestive motor migratory complex (IMMC) is relevant in gastroenterology because most of the gastrointestinal pathologies are reflected in anomalies of the IMMC. The aim of this work is to develop an automatic classifier to discriminate among the different intestinal contractile activity degrees (quiescence, irregular, and maximum contractile activity) that compound...
The development of an inmunosensor for the point-of-care detection of the foot-and-mouth cattle disease is presented. The detector is based on an ELISA method with electrochemical detection. A non-structural protein, 3ABC, is used to selectively detect antibodies is used to selectively detect anti-3ABC antibodies produced after infection. The biological test is performed onto a screen printed electrodes...
A recent study on witricity (wireless electricity) has demonstrated that wireless energy can be delivered over a moderate distance using strongly coupled magnetic resonance. The objective of this work is to apply the witricity technology to the problem of powering a wireless Body Sensor Network (wBSN). The theory of witricity is investigated using coupled mode theory. Compact witricity resonators...
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...
This study investigated the usefulness of the very low spectral content of single-channel airflow recordings to help in the diagnosis of the obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) syndrome. Additionally, we evaluated whether airflow frequency components in the 0.01 - 0.10 Hz band are linked with desaturations in blood oxygen saturation (SaO2) recordings due to apnea events. The relationship between changes...
In North America, an estimated 30,000 patients annually experience an aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH). In approximately five percent of these patients, the hemorrhage is not visible on computerized tomography scans due to the inability to image blood at time intervals greater than 12 hours post symptom onset. For these patients (many of which have experience a sentinel hemorrhage that is...
Disordered swallowing, or dysphagia, is a common problem seen in patients undergoing treatment for cancer, stroke and neurodegenerative illnesses. This disease is associated with aspiration-induced chest infections. The methods currently used for diagnosis, however, are qualitative or based on expensive equipment. Swallowing accelerometry is a promising low-cost, quantitative and noninvasive tool...
Worldwide incidence and mortality rates due to cancer continue to rise, with the burden of disease increasingly shifting to developing countries. Several optical diagnostic methods such as diffuse optical tomography, wide-field autofluorescence imaging, confocal microscopy, and optical coherence tomography, are currently under development to enable earlier detection of cancer. However, these are primarily...
We have achieved the first complete, non-instrumented nucleic acid amplification test (NAAT) using a calcium oxide heat source thermally linked to an engineered phase change material. These two components alone maintain a thermal profile suitable for the loop-mediated isothermal amplification assay. Starting with computational fluid dynamics analysis, we identified nominal geometry for the exothermic...
In this paper we present a low-cost hardware and software solution for monitoring gaze and head movements in infants. The proposed device consists in a webcam and a magneto-inertial sensor mounted on a cap. Signal acquisition and elaboration is carried out on a common PC. Technological choices and calibration procedures rely on a minimally obtrusive and ecological approach. The purpose of this work...
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...
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