Critical Reviews in Biomedical Engineering

Over the past several years, cilia in the primitive node have become recognized more and more for their contribution to development, and more specifically, for their role in axis determination. Although many of the mechanisms behind their influence remain undocumented, it is known that their presence and motion in the primitive node of developing embryos is the determinant of the left-right axis. Studies on cilial mechanics and nodal fluid dynamics have provided clues as to how this asymmetry mechanism works, and more importantly, have shown that direct manipulation of the flow field in the node can directly influence physiology...

Microfluidic devices are capable of handling 10-9 L to 10-18 L of fluids by incorporating tiny channels with dimensions of ten to hundreds of micrometers, and they can be fabricated using a wide range of materials including glass, silicon, polymers, paper, and cloth for tailored sensing applications. Microfluidic biosensors integrated with detection methods such as electrochemiluminescence (ECL) can be used for the diagnosis and prognosis of diseases. Coupled with ECL, these tandem devices are capable of sensing biomarkers at nanomolar to picomolar concentrations, reproducibly...

An outbreak of foodborne pathogens would cause severe consequences. Detecting and diagnosing foodborne diseases is crucial for food safety, and it is increasingly important to develop fast, sensitive, and cost-effective methods for detecting foodborne pathogens. In contrast to traditional methods, such as medium-based culture, nucleic acid amplification test, and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, electrochemical biosensors possess the advantages of simplicity, rapidity, high sensitivity, miniaturization, and low cost, making them ideal for developing pathogen-sensing devices...

The present work is focused on the study of hemodynamic characteristics for tortuous arteries/veins. Tortuosity in arteries/veins is defined by introducing waviness in the wall of the tube. Analysis is further extended for bifurcated veins with and without wavy walls. Waviness is defined by two geometric parameters; pitch and depth of the wave. Four different combinations of pitch and depth are studied and compared with a plain straight wall. The present study is carried out numerically by using a computational fluid dynamics tool...

Deep learning offers a promising methodology for the registration of prostate cancer images from histopathology to MRI. We explored how to effectively leverage key information from images to achieve improved end-to-end registration. We developed an approach based on a correlation attention registration framework to register segmentation labels of histopathology onto MRI. The network was trained using paired prostate datasets of histopathology and MRI from the Cancer Imaging Archive. We introduced An L2-Pearson correlation layer to enhance feature matching...

A good tooth cusp extraction is helpful in evaluating the effect of cosmetic dental work in virtual tooth surgery. We propose a new tooth cusp extraction, which integrates the DBSCAN (density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise) clustering algorithm with the neighborhood search algorithm to extract tooth cusp from a three-dimensional cloud-point tooth model. This method used the point cloud height and curvature to screen out the dented point set. Then we employ the DBSCAN clustering algorithm to segment different feature regions of the tooth surface and generate the candidate point set...

Ultrasound elastography is a valuable method employed to evaluate tissue stiffness, with shear-wave elastography (SWE) recently gaining significance in various settings. This literature review aims to explore the potential of SWE as a diagnostic and monitoring tool for musculoskeletal injuries. In total, 15 studies were found and included in the review. The outcomes of these studies demonstrate the effectiveness of SWE in detecting stiffness changes in individuals diagnosed with Achilles tendinopathy, Achilles tendon rupture, rotator cuff rupture, tendinosis of the long head of the biceps tendon, injury of the supraspinatus muscle, medial tibial stress syndrome, and patellar tendinopathy...

Combined the improved fast independent component analysis (FastICA) algorithm with the singular value decomposition algorithm, a single-channel fetal electrocardiogram (fECG) extraction method is proposed. First, the improved FastICA algorithm is used to estimate the maternal ECG component from a single-channel abdominal signal of pregnant women using an overrelaxation factor. Then, a preliminary estimate of the fECG signal is obtained by subtracting from the single-channel abdominal signal. Subsequently, the singular value decomposition algorithm is used to denoise the preliminarily estimated fECG signal to obtain a high signal-to-noise ratio...

The retinal image is a trusted modality in biomedical image-based diagnosis of many ophthalmologic and cardiovascular diseases. Periodic examination of the retina can help in spotting these abnormalities in the early stage. However, to deal with today's large population, computerized retinal image analysis is preferred over manual inspection. The precise extraction of the retinal vessel is the first and decisive step for clinical applications. Every year, many more articles are added to the literature that describe new algorithms for the problem at hand...

The efficacy of every neuromodulation modality depends upon the characteristics of the electrodes used to stimulate the chosen target. The geometrical, chemical, mechanical and physical configuration of electrodes used in neurostimulation affects several performance attributes like stimulation efficiency, selectivity, tissue response, etc. The efficiency of stimulation in relation to electrode impedance is influenced by the electrode material and/or its geometry. The nature of the electrode material determines the charge transfer across the electrode-tissue interface, which also relates to neuronal tissue damage...

Malignant tumors of the pancreas are the fourth leading cause of cancer-related deaths. This is mainly because they are often diagnosed at a late stage. One of the challenges in diagnosing focal lesions in the pancreas is the difficulty in distinguishing them from other conditions due to the unique location and anatomy of the organ, as well as the similarity in their ultrasound characteristics. One of the most sensitive imaging modalities of the pancreas is endoscopic ultrasonography. However, clinicians recognize that EUS is a difficult and highly operator-dependent method, while its results are highly dependent on the experience of the investigator...

The handheld drill has been used as a conventional surgical tool for centuries. Alongside the recent successes of surgical robots, the development of new and enhanced medical drills has improved surgeon ability without requiring the high cost and consuming setup times that plague medical robot systems. This work provides an overview of enhanced handheld surgical drill research focusing on systems that include some form of image guidance and do not require additional hardware that physically supports or guides drilling...

A specialized Y-type pipeline is developed to replace medical disposable Y-type pipelines for ventilator calibration and to improve accuracy, providing a reference for improvement. According to the calibration specifications of ventilators, tests are performed on specialized pipelines and more to compare their data. Taking the tidal volume 400-mL detection point as an example, the calibration errors made by medical disposable pipelines and specialized pipelines are 6.2% and -0.8%, respectively, and the errors at other detection points are roughly the same...

Respiratory diseases are a major cause of death worldwide, affecting a significant proportion of the population with lung function abnormalities that can lead to respiratory illnesses. Early detection and prevention are critical to effective management of these disorders. Deep learning algorithms offer a promising approach for analyzing complex medical data and aiding in early disease detection. While transformer-based models for sequence classification have proven effective for tasks like sentiment analysis, topic classification, etc...

The landscape of breast cancer diagnostics has significantly evolved over the past decade. With these changes, it is possible to provide a comprehensive assessment of both benign and malignant breast calcifications. The biochemistry of breast cancer and calcifications are thoroughly examined to describe the potential to characterize better different calcium salts composed of calcium carbonate, calcium oxalate, or calcium hydroxyapatite and their associated prognostic implications. Conventional mammographic imaging techniques are compared to available ones, including breast tomosynthesis and contrast-enhanced mammography...

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) has become the most serious health concern in India and globally. The cost of treatment for CVD is very high and in a country like India, where most of the population belongs to rural area, affording treatment is not possible. Diagnosis and treatment are further hampered due to shortage of medical expertise as well as the unavailability of the wearable device. This makes the condition worst in rural areas. As a result of delay in diagnosis, patients do not receive appropriate treatment on time, thus risking lives...

The present-day healthcare system operates on a 4G network, where the data rate needed for many IoT devices is impossible. Also, the latency involved in the network does not support the use of many devices in the network. The 5G-based cellular technology promises an effective healthcare management system with high speed and low latency. The 5G communication technology will replace the 4G technology to satisfy the increasing demand for high data rates. It incorporates higher frequency bands of around 100 MHz using millimetre waves and broadband modulation schemes...

In public health, the transmission characteristics and laws of highly infectious virus-carrying particles in the air environment have become a hot topic. The study on the spread characteristics of human virus-carrying droplets in a typical densely populated space is necessary. As such, a classroom space lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) model with a dense population is established to simulate and analyze the spreading and diffusing behavior of pathogenic droplets. The results show that the dispersion density is mainly affected by the mainstream wind direction in the area of concern, and particle aggregation is more likely to form in the area close to the wind disturbance...

Cancer, a leading cause of mortality, is distinguished by the multi-stage conversion of healthy cells into cancer cells. Discovery of the disease early can significantly enhance the possibility of survival. Histology is a procedure where the tissue of interest is first surgically removed from a patient and cut into thin slices. A pathologist will then mount these slices on glass slides, stain them with specialized dyes like hematoxylin and eosin (H&E), and then inspect the slides under a microscope. Unfortunately, a manual analysis of histopathology images during breast cancer biopsy is time consuming...

Medical images are providing vital information to aid physicians in diagnosing a disease afflicting the organ of a human body. Magnetic resonance imaging is an important imaging modality in capturing the soft tissues of the brain. Segmenting and extracting the brain is essential in studying the structure and pathological condition of brain. There are several methods that are developed for this purpose. Researchers in brain extraction or segmentation need to know the current status of the work that have been done...