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In medical research it is of great importance to be able to quickly obtain answers to inquiries about system response to different stimuli. Modeling the dynamics of biological regulatory networks is a promising approach to achieve this goal, but existing modeling approaches suffer from complexity issues and become inefficient with large networks. In order to improve the efficiency, we propose the...
A workflow for associating fuzzy clusters to biological pathways has been implemented as a Java-based software tool. Its software implementation is comprised of a correlation-based fuzzy c-means algorithm and an enrichment test on Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes' pathways. We applied this workflow to gene expression in classification of lung cancer cell types and achieved satisfactory results...
The effectiveness of retinal prosthetics will depend on their ability to elicit patterns of neural activity that can be recognized by the visual cortex. While conventional short-duration pulses activate retinal neurons effectively, many nearby neurons are thought to respond similarly to a given pulse train — a situation that is non-physiological. Use of pulse trains delivered at rates > 1000 pulses...
Misuse of medications is a major cause of morbidity and mortality. The pervasiveness of non-adherence to medications is having significant health care implications, including costly and distressing hospitalization. This paper presents a new method for delivering medication instructions that incorporates all aspects of all medications in a regimen into one chronological schedule, rather than using...
Many robotic systems have been developed to provide assistance to individuals with disabilities. Most of these systems require the individual to interact with the robot via a joystick or keypad, though some utilize techniques such as speech recognition or selection of objects with a laser pointer. In this paper, we describe a prototype system using a novel method of interaction with an assistive robot...
High resolution mapping of electrical activity is becoming an important technique for analysing normal and dysrhythmic gastrointestinal (GI) slow wave activity. Several methods are used to extract meaningful information from the large quantities of data obtained, however, at present these methods can only be used offline. Thus, all analysis currently performed is retrospective and done after the recordings...
A home is smart when, being aware of its own state and that of its users, is capable of controlling itself in order to support the user wishes and thus improving their quality of life. This holds both for users with special needs and for those with ordinary domestic needs. In this paper, we overview the Smart Homes for All project which represents the current state of the art with respect to software...
Constraint-Induced Movement Therapy (CI therapy) has been shown to be an effective approach for improving arm function in stroke survivors with mild to severe hemiparesis. Given the time-intensive nature of the intervention, and the inherent costs and travel required to receive in-clinic treatment, the accessibility and availability of CI therapy is limited. To facilitate home-based CI therapy, a...
When performing telesurgery with current commercially available Minimally Invasive Robotic Surgery (MIRS) systems, a surgeon cannot feel the tool interactions that are inherent in traditional laparoscopy. It is proposed that haptic feedback in the control of MIRS systems could improve the speed, safety and learning curve of robotic surgery. To test this hypothesis, a standalone surgical haptic arm...
This article describes a new interaction device for surgical navigation systems — the so-called navigation mouse system. The idea is to use a tracked instrument of a surgical navigation system like a pointer to control the software. The new interaction system extends existing navigation systems with a microcontroller-unit. The microcontroller-unit uses the existing communication line to extract the...
The intracranial pressure (ICP) monitoring is a common procedure in neuro-intensive care for pathologies such traumatic brain injuries or hemorrhages, but also for chronic ones as the Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH). The only available treatment for NPH is the surgical implantation of a shunt with the aim of routing cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) away from the brain to another part of the body. In...
Audiovisual interaction has been one of the most important topics in cognitive neurosciences. Visual stimuli could significantly impact the auditory perception, and vice versa. Nevertheless, how much the change in visual stimuli would influence the perception of auditory change remains to be investigated. In this paper, we designed an audiovisual experiment in which subjects were required to judge...
In order to assist physicians and other health professionals for health care improvement, clinical decision support systems, through interactive computerized software, become very popular in clinical practice. The crisis associated with kidney organ shortage has triggered an innovative strategy, termed as Kidney Paired Donation (KPD) program, to address a rapidly expanding demand for donor kidneys...
The aim of this study was to investigate, if it is possible to detect brain activity related to motor planning and suppression with the help of Electroencephalograms (EEG), the ultimate goal being, to simultaneously measure EEG and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Towards this end we engaged a delayed response task from an earlier fMRI study, thereby ensuring, as a first step, that the...
Proprioceptive and motor information contribute to movement representation; however, the equivalence of homologous contralateral information has received little attention. In a recent study using the matching paradigm we showed that upper limb position sense, based on feedback control, is asymmetric and this asymmetry could be associated with a difference in gain between left (L) and right (R) sensorimotor...
In this paper a new automatic skull stripping method for T1-weighted MR image of human brain is presented. Skull stripping is a process that allows to separate the brain from the rest of tissues. The proposed method is based on a 2D brain extraction making use of fuzzy c-means segmentation and morphological operators applied on transversal slices. The approach is extended to the 3D case, taking into...
This paper presents a design and implementation of a neural-machine interface (NMI) for artificial legs that can decode amputee's intended movement in real time. The newly designed NMI integrates an FPGA chip for fast processing and a microcontroller unit (MCU) with multiple on-chip analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) for real-time data sampling. The resulting embedded system is able to sample in...
The myriad pathologies leading to and resulting from atrial fibrillation (AF) have led to many theories regarding how substrate should be defined and how to reconcile substrate ablation with trigger ablation. The identification of spatiotemporally stable areas of very low amplitude short cycle length CFAE in a sea of otherwise discrete normal amplitude and relatively longer cycle length electrograms...
The multitude of biosignal file formats used in research has hampered the easy exchange of biosignals and their use with physiological modelling software. We describe an abstract data model that accommodates the diversity of formats, along with a software implementation which links biosignal data into the Semantic Web, using existing data formats. Initial application of our work is to sleep study...
With the introduction of intensive new treatments such as hypo-fractionation and proton beam therapy, localization of the tumor target volume and tracking of points across the skin entrance surface have become critically important. Optical metrology has been used to monitor the patient's bulk position and motion throughout treatment. However systems have not been capable of high temporal and spatial...
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