Critical Reviews in Biomedical Engineering

One of the key echographic signs of focal pathology of the pancreas is the presence of formation contours and their nature. Endoscopic ultrasonography has a unique ability to visualize the echographic texture of the pancreatic parenchyma, and also allows you to assess in detail the boundaries and nature of the contours of the tumor formations of the organ due to the proximity of the ultrasound sensor. However, the differential diagnosis of focal pancreatic lesions remains a difficult clinical task due to the similarity of their echosemiotics...

Bone is one of the most complex, inaccessible body structures, responsible for calcium storage and haematopoiesis. The second highest cause of death across the world is cancer. Amongst all the types of cancers, bone cancer treatment modalities are limited due to the structural complexity and inaccessibility of bones. The worldwide incidence of bone diseases and bone defects due to cancer, infection, trauma, age-related bone degeneration is increasing. Currently different conventional therapies are available for bone cancer such as chemotherapy, surgery and radiotherapy, but they have several disadvantages associated with them...

Nailfold capillaroscopy is a tool which is non-invasive in nature and can be useful for diagnosis, research, therapeutic study and prognosis. Research shows that specific capillary morphology patterns are identified for diabetic subjects, hypertensive subjects and normal controls. In this study, we have proposed RATHEW approach of classifying these three classes of subjects. RATHEW approach employs a three step process for classifying nailfold images: one, identify six abnormality parameters from the image dataset; two, score these abnormality parameters based on the defined scoring rules; and three, combine them mathematically to segregate them into three classes...

Vestibular evoked myogenic potentials (VEMPs) in individuals with diabetes mellitus (DM) provide evidence as how diabetes can bring about changes in the peripheral nervous system. Cervical VEMP (cVEMP) evaluates the function and integrity of the sacullo- collic pathway and ocular VEMP (oVEMP) evaluates the utriculo-collic pathway. cVEMP is an ipsilateral inhibitory response of the sternocleidomastoid muscle. cVEMP is recorded at higher intensity above 80-85 dBnHL with biphasic waveforms having initial peak positivity P13 followed by a negativity N23...

Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) leakage is a common postoperative complication of neurosurgical procedures, with iatrogenic causes accounting for 16% of CSF leakages. This complication increases healthcare costs and patient morbidity. The focus of this review is to analyze the rates of CSF leakage of some of the most commonly used xenogeneic and synthetic dural substitutes following surgeries in the infratentorial region of the brain where surgical repair can be most challenging. A systematic literature search was conducted using studies detailing duraplasty procedures performed with nonautologous grafts in the infratentorial region in PubMed...

Engineers play a critical role in the advancement of biomedical science and the development of diagnostic and therapeutic technologies for human well-being. The complexity of medical problems requires the synthesis of diverse knowledge systems and clinical experiences to develop solutions. Therefore, engineers in the healthcare and biomedical industries are interdisciplinary by nature to innovate technical tools in sophisticated clinical settings. In academia, engineering is usually divided into disciplines with dominant characteristics...

This work aims at improving the quality of health assessments, specifically under the influence of occupational risk factors. For this purpose, additional informative indicators are utilized in prognostic and diagnostic models. The models are used to characterize the level of body protection based on oxidative status. A quantitative method is proposed to assess the body's level of protection by means of the levels of lipid peroxidation and antioxidant activity, which characterize the body's oxidative status...

The COVID-19 pandemic, emerging/re-emerging infections as well as other non-communicable chronic diseases, highlight the necessity of smart microfluidic point-of-care diagnostic (POC) devices and systems in developing nations as risk factors for infections, severe disease manifestations and poor clinical outcomes are highly represented in these countries. These POC devices are also becoming vital as analytical procedures executable outside of conventional laboratory settings are seen as the future of healthcare delivery...

A major challenge of gene therapy is to achieve highly specific transgene expression in tissues of interest with minimized off-target expression. Ultrasound in combination with microbubbles can transiently increase permeability of desired cells or tissues and thereby facilitate gene transfer. This kind of ultrasound-driven transgene expression has gained increasing attention due to its deep tissue penetration and high spatiotemporal resolution. However, successful genetic manipulation in vivo with ultrasound need to well optimize various aspects involved in this process...

Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the most widely occurring congenital defect and accounts to about 28% of the overall congenital defects. Analysis of the development of the fetal heart thus plays an important role for detection of abnormality in early stages and to take corrective measures. Cardiac chamber analysis is one of the important diagnosing methods. Segmentation of the cardiac chambers must be done appropriately to avoid false interpretations. Effective segmentation of fetal ventricular chambers is a challenging task as the speckle noise inherent in ultrasound images cause blurring of the boundaries of anatomical structures...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neurological condition that limits an individual's capacity for communication and learning throughout their life. Although symptoms of Autism can be diagnosed in individuals of different ages, it is labeled as a developmental disorder because symptoms typically start to show up in the initial 2 years of childhood. Autism has no single known cause but multiple factors contribute to its etiology in children. Because symptoms and severity of ASD vary in every individual, there could be many causes...

Cancer has been the deadliest of diseases since decades constituting a large number of deaths annually. Lung cancer remains one of the most significant public health issues, accounting for a substantial proportion of cancer-related deaths globally. Despite ongoing efforts to curb the instances of lung cancer, India continues to see a high number of new diagnoses each year, estimated to be 70,000. Early detection of lung cancer can be difficult due to its asymptomatic nature in its initial stages. However, advancements in technology have given rise to computer-aided diagnostic systems to help overcome this challenge...

Surface modification is the science of manipulating surface morphology and interfacial properties and also plays a vital role in biomedical implantation. A few of the interfacial properties are biocompatibility, protein adsorption, wettability, cell proliferation, collagen, etc. These properties depend on surface modification strategies and significantly impact the implant response within the host body. Generally, the corrosion, surface wear, and degradation in the physiological environment limit the application of different biomaterials and can address through various surface modification strategies...

A simple computational approach to simulation of healing in long bone fractures is presented. In particular, an algorithm that could simulate the formation, maturation, and resorption of fracture callus is developed and validated. The simplicity of the approach lies in the fact that the algorithm uses only the applied load and a single constraint parameter for the entire simulation. The work hypothesizes bone healing as a comprehensive energy minimization process where mechanical stimulation is proposed as the primary precursor for the beginning of different stages (i...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Since the coronavirus came into existence and brought the entire world to a standstill, there have been drastic changes in people's lives that continue to affect them even as the pandemic recedes. The isolation reduced physical activity and hindered access to non-COVID related healthcare during lockdown and the ensuing months brought increased attention to mental health and the neurological disorders that might have been exacerbated. One nervous system disorder that affects the elderly and needs better awareness is Parkinson's disease...

Investigation concerning the bioinspired pumping flow of viscous fluids in the porous region using Darcy's law is demonstrated in the present article. The rhythmic membrane contraction propels fluids in the porous microchannel. The periodic contraction of the membrane is utilized in the present analysis to introduce the unique pumping mechanism. For small pattern, width to channel height ratio (i.e., the channel is substantially longer than its width) and at low Reynolds numbers, the governing equations are solved by an analytical approach...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder. Hence, there is a tremendous demand for adapting vocal features to determine PD in an earlier stage. This paper devises a technique to diagnose PD using voice signals. Initially, the voice signals are considered an input. The signal is fed to pre-processing wherein the filtering is adapted to remove noise. Thereafter, feature extraction is done that includes fluctuation index, spectral flux, spectral centroid, Mel frequency Cepstral coefficient (MFCC), spectral spread, tonal power ratio, spectral kurtosis and the proposed Exponential delta-Amplitude modulation signal (delta-AMS)...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Bone resection is a common technique in modern surgery, which can be divided into contact (such as mechanical osteotomy and ultrasonic osteotomy) and non-contact (such as laser osteotomy). Irrespective of the excision method, it causes processing damage to natural bone material, thus affecting bone healing. To reduce the machining damage in bone resection, different machining variables (cutting fluid temperature, feed rate, rotational speed, and ultrasonic frequency) were considered to explore the selection of various cutting conditions...