2010 Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology

Ten minisymposia abstracts are provided. View full abstract»

General anesthesia is a drug-induced, reversible condition comprised of five behavioral states: hypnosis (loss of consciousness), amnesia (loss of memory), analgesia (loss of pain sensation), akinesia (immobility), and hemodynamic stability with control of the stress response. The mechanisms by which anesthetic drugs induce the state of general anesthesia remain one of the biggest mysteries of mod... View full abstract»

Many issues we routinely experience with respect to solving health care or public health problems, such as medical errors, occur and are perpetuated because of our silos or stovepipes of information. The scientific community and the EMBS recognize intimately that preparing for the provision of health care, and erecting our public health system of tomorrow, is not just a matter of converging hetero... View full abstract»

Emotion discrimination from electroencephalogram (EEG) has gained attention the last decade as a user-friendly and effective approach to EEG-based emotion recognition (EEG-ER) systems. Nevertheless, challenging issues regarding the emotion elicitation procedure, especially its effectiveness, raise. In this work, a novel method, which not only evaluates the degree of emotion elicitation but localiz... View full abstract»

Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) enables researchers to conduct studies in situations where use of other functional imaging methods is impossible. An important shortcoming of fNIRS is the sensitivity to motion artifacts. We propose a new wavelet based algorithm for removing movement artifacts from fNIRS signals. We tested the method on simulated and experimental fNIRS data. The result... View full abstract»

Regular video cameras shoot normally at 25/30 frames per second (fps). Actually there are available in the market equipments that allow us to acquire video at 1.000.000 fps. When we observe a video sequence it becomes noticeable that great part of the information remains unchanged regardless of the bit rate or frame rate used. One origin of discontinuity in video signals is directly related to mov... View full abstract»

The analysis of the electrical activity of the uterus recorded externally, the electrohysterogram (EHG), may find an application in the prediction of labor. In the literature parameters that are supposed to be related to the excitability of the uterine cells have almost exclusively been used for this purpose. In the present paper we evaluate the possible use of synchronization parameters for EHG m... View full abstract»

k-t PCA is a regularized image reconstruction method to recover images from highly undersampled dynamic magnetic resonance data. It is based on the decomposition of the training and the undersampled data into temporally and spatially invariant terms using principal component analysis. In this paper, a compartment-based k-t PCA reconstruction approach is presented, with the objective of improving h... View full abstract»

Digital Image Elasto Tomography (DIET) is a non-invasive elastographic breast cancer screening technology, based on image-based measurement of surface vibrations induced on a breast by mechanical actuation. Knowledge of frequency response characteristics of a breast prior to imaging is critical to maximize the imaging signal and diagnostic capability of the system. A feasibility analysis for a non... View full abstract»

This paper summarizes dynamic measurements of shear modulus constants acquired for spontaneously growing rat mammary tumors. Measurements are compared with histology to determine tumor types. We also report on 3D shear-wave velocity fields acquired from an inhomogeneous hydrogel phantom with known mechanical properties. Phantom measurements enable us to interpret the effects of tissue structure an... View full abstract»

This paper presents a phase-based method for estimating subpixel motion in medical ultrasound imaging. The main novelty is to propose a closed form expression for local motion estimation in space domain based on the model of the monogenic signal. First, the proposed method uses the properties of the monogenic signal in order to extract local orientation and phase data of ultrasound images. Second,... View full abstract»

The early detection of biomechanical modifications in the arterial wall could be used as a predictor factor for various diseases, for example hypertension or atherosclerosis. In this work a transient elastography technique is used for the in vitro evaluation of the arterial wall elasticity. The obtained Young modulus is compared with the one obtained by a more classical approach: pressure-diameter... View full abstract»

An important goal in clinical cardiology is the non-invasive quantification of regional cardiac deformation. While many methods have been proposed for the estimation of 3D left ventricular deformation and strains derived from 4D ultrasound, currently there is a lack of in vivo clinical validation of these algorithms on humans. In this paper, we describe the experiments used in validating cardiac d... View full abstract»

Our group has been investigating the use of Shearwave Dispersion Ultrasound Vibrometry (SDUV) for quantifying viscoelasticity of the myocardium. The primary aim of this study is the design and testing of viscoelastic materials suitable for validation of the Lamb wave model in the heart. The Lamb wave SDUV method was used to measure shear wave velocity dispersion of gelatin and urethane rubber plat... View full abstract»