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This paper covers two proof of principle trials in an ongoing project to develop a fast, portable, and low-cost optical probe that uses Stokes polarimetry to evaluate skin lesions. Polarization is a property of light waves that describes the orientation and shape of their oscillations. The polarization state can be described using Stokes parameters, and several measurements derived from these parameters...
Hirschsprung's disease is a gut motility disorder, which can affect newborns and children, characterized by absent ganglion cells within the rectum or colorectum. Surgical intervention involves a pull-through operation, connecting ganglionic segments together after excising the aganglionic segment. Subjective examination of seromuscular biopsies and resected segment for ganglion cells by a pathologist...
Human arm performs dextrous movements through the voluntary contraction of muscles. To produce a given body movement, a group of muscles are usually acting in a synergic fashion. It is possible that information about a movement could also be extracted from an individual muscle within a synergic group. Physiologically, the large biceps brachii (BB) muscle is involved in forearm flexion and hand supination...
Atrial Fibrillation (AF), a most common cardiac arrhythmia affects more than 2.3 million people in the US and associated with increased risk of stroke, heart failure and death. Cather ablation to treat paroxysmal AF patients is somewhat successful with challenges remaining to accurately identify the active sites for persistent AF patients which may occur outside the pulmonary vein (PV) region due...
Fluctuations of the cardiac pacemaker cell membrane voltage can affect the regularity of the heartbeat. Understanding the effects of stochastic membrane variations on the period of spontaneous activity would help determine the stability and robustness of pacemaker cells. The specific dependency of these effects and the rate of spontaneous activity in presence of a bias parameter were studied in the...
The HIV-1 virus affects millions of people around the world. Identifying novel protein-protein interactions (PPIs) between HIV and humans would lead to a better understanding of the virus and possibly to new treatment targets. The Proteinprotein Interaction Prediction Engine (PIPE) is a broadly applicable, highly precise, and computationally efficient method of predicting PPIs. Here, PIPE is used...
The past decades marked a significant progress in the development of exoskeletons in research and in industry. The increasing use of exoskeletons in a variety of fields is a testimony to the advancements made by this class of human mobility assistive devices. The following paper provides a review of current development in lower extremity exoskeletons that deliver walking assistance. The paper focuses...
Clustering is a prominent method to identify similar patterns in large groups of data and can be beneficial in the bioinformatics studies due to this property. Classical methods such as k-means and maximum likelihood consider a mixture of Gaussian probability density function (PDF) of data and find clusters based on maximizing the PDF. However, correlation among different groups of data and existence...
Interoperability stands in the ability of different information systems to exchange data. Today interoperability is highly requested in several departments of healthcare organizations. Dialysis facilities register a high delay in the possibility of data exchange, because the strong lack of standards results in a huge gap in having interoperable systems. This work represents a first effort to overcome...
Computational models of vocal fold vibration are used to investigate the physics that governs speech. The effect of a polyp's mass, stiffness, position, and aspect ratios on the natural frequencies and modes of vibration of a vocal fold are studied using an in-house finite element code. Polyp mass has the most significant effect, damping vibration. The damping effect of the polyp's excess mass is...
This paper proposes a model to classify saccades from frontal (i.e., Fp1/Fp2) electroencephalography (EEG) data into up, down, left and right directions. The aim of the model is to provide brain-computer interfaces with improved cursor control without the need for a separate eye tracking device. To test the accuracy of the model "in-the-wild," an EEG dataset with (uncontrolled) natural saccades...
Many bioinformatics data sets have class-imbalanced data, where the number of samples in each class is not equal. Since most of data sets contain usual versus unusual cases, e.g. cancer versus normal or miRNAs versus other non-coding RNA, where the minority class with the least number of samples is the interesting class that contains the unusual cases. The learning models based on the standard classifiers,...
Stress urinary incontinence (SUI) is highly prevalent among women, and is associated with biomechanical defects in the urogenital system. Current approaches to quantifying urogenital mechanics are limited. The purpose of this research is to develop semi-automated software that compensates for in-plane translational and rotational probe motion during kinematic analyses based on dynamic sagittal-plane...
Electroencephalography (EEG) is a common method of obtaining temporally distinguishable event-related potentials (ERP). The quality of the signal is dependent on several factors, including the selection of the amplifier system and electrode type. The aim of this study is to compare the performance of two electrode types, active and passive, with their respectively optimized amplifier system, in distinguishing...
A system for wireless bioimpedance measurements in small localized volumes was investigated using a millimeter-sized implantable device powered by ultrasound energy. The minimally invasive implant is very simple, consisting of two passive components that receive and demodulate the ultrasound which then directly drives tissue currents. By varying the ultrasound drive level and its amplitude modulation...
With the incidence of disease related lower limb amputation on the rise in the United States, a decrease in the requisite time for rehabilitation is needed to ensure a better prognosis for patients. It is proposed that the incorporation of a haptic feedback training aid would do just this. This research has experimentally investigated the usage of two haptic feedback systems in conveying information...
A preliminary study into the signal quality of the Empatica's E4 portable photoplethysmogram device as validation for further research on using the device to detect the heart arrhythmia atrial fibrillation. In order to pursue this research, it was necessary to verify the quality of the data produced by the E4 device against a device currently used by clinicians to detect atrial fibrillation. This...
Characterizing plantar soft tissue mechanical properties is essential to fully understand the potential for ulcer formation in diabetic patients. Ulcers initiate in the under layers of foot where soft tissues become stiffer. If changes in soft tissue stiffness can be detected early, foot ulcer formation may be prevented. Also, monitoring soft tissue mechanical properties could be beneficial for prosthetic...
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