IEEE Reviews in Biomedical Engineering

Tissue examination by hand remains an essential technique in clinical practice. The effective application depends on skills in sensorimotor coordination, mainly involving haptic, visual, and auditory feedback. The skills clinicians have to learn can be as subtle as regulating finger pressure with breathing, choosing palpation action, monitoring involuntary facial and vocal expressions in response to palpation, and using pain expressions both as a source of information and as a constraint on physical examination...

Stroke is a serious neurological disease that may lead to long-term disabilities and even death for stroke patients worldwide. The acute period, (1 month post-stroke), is crucial for rehabilitation but the current standard clinical practice may be ineffective for patients with severe motor impairment, since most rehabilitation programs involve physical movement. Imagined movement the so-called motor imagery (MI) has been shown to activate motor areas of the brain without physical movement. MI therefore offers an opportunity for early rehabilitation of stroke patients...

Electromyography (EMG) signals are instrumental in a variety of applications including prosthetic control, muscle health assessment, rehabilitation, and workplace monitoring. Signal contaminants including noise, interference, and artifacts can degrade the quality of the EMG signal, leading to misinterpretation; therefore it is important to ensure that collected EMG signals are of sufficient quality prior to further analysis. A literature search was conducted to identify current approaches for detecting, identifying, and quantifying contaminants within surface EMG signals...

The study of ocular manifestations of neurodegenerative disorders, Oculomics, is a growing field of investigation for early diagnostics, enabling structural and chemical biomarkers to be monitored overtime to predict prognosis. Traumatic brain injury (TBI) triggers cascade of events harmful to the brain, which can lead to neurodegeneration. TBI, termed the silent epidemic is becoming a leading cause of death and disability worldwide. There is currently no effective diagnostic tool for TBI, and yet, early-intervention is known to considerably shorten hospital stays, improve outcomes, fasten neurological recovery and lower mortality rates, highlighting the unmet need for techniques capable of rapid and accurate point-of-care diagnostics, implemented in the earliest stages...

Technologies for quantifying circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) in liquid biopsies could enable real-time measurements of cancer progression, profoundly impacting patient care. Sequencing methods can be too complex and time-consuming for regular point-of-care monitoring, but nanotechnology offers an alternative, harnessing the unique properties of objects tens to hundreds of nanometres in size. This systematic review was performed to identify all examples of nanotechnology-based ctDNA detection and assess their potential for clinical use...

WiFi sensing has recently received significant interest from academics, industry, healthcare professionals and other caregivers (including family members) as a potential mechanism to monitor our aging population at distance, without deploying devices on users bodies. In particular, these methods have gained significant interest to efficiently detect critical events such as falls, sleep disturbances, wandering behavior, respiratory disorders, and abnormal cardiac activity experienced by vulnerable people. The interest in such WiFi-based sensing systems stems from its practical deployments in indoor settings and compliance from monitored persons, unlike other sensors such as wearables, camera-based, and acoustic-based solutions...

Electrocardiography is the gold standard technique for detecting abnormal heart conditions. Automatic analysis of electrocardiogram (ECG) can help physicians in the interoperation of the large amount of data produced daily by cardiac monitors. As the successful application of supervised machine learning algorithms relies on unprecedented amounts of labeled training data, there is a growing need for unsupervised algorithms for ECG analysis. Unsupervised learning aims to partition ECG into distinct abnormality classes without cardiologist-supplied labelsa process referred to as ECG clustering...

Neuroscientists seek efficient solutions for deciphering the sophisticated unknowns of the brain. Effective development of complicated brain-related tools is the focal point of research in neuroscience and neurotechnology. Thanks to today's technological advancements, the physical development of high-density and high-resolution neural interfaces has been made possible. This is where the critical bottleneck in receiving the expected functionality from such devices shifts to transferring, processing, and subsequently analyzing the massive neurophysiological extra-cellular data recorded...

Novel additive manufacturing techniques are revolutionizing fields of industry providing more dimensions to control and the versatility of fabricating multi-material products. Medical applications hold great promise to manufacture constructs of mixed biologically compatible materials together with functional cells and tissues. We reviewed technologies and promising developments nurturing innovation of physiologically relevant models with potential to study safety of mixed chemicals that are hard to reproduce in current models, or diseases for which there are no models available...

Cardiovascular disease is a deadly global health crisis that carries a substantial financial burden. Innovative treatment and management of cardiovascular disease straddles medicine, personalized hemodynamic modeling, machine learning, and modern imaging to help improve patient outcomes and reduce the economic impact. Hemodynamic modeling offers a non-invasive method to provide clinicians with new pre- and post- procedural metrics and aid in the selection of treatment options. Medical imaging is an integral part in clinical workflows for understanding and managing cardiac disease and interventions...

Closed loop optogenetic brain stimulation enhances the efficacy of the stimulation by adjusting the stimulation parameters based on direct feedback from the target area of the brain. It combines the principles of genetics, physiology, electrical engineering, optics, signal processing and control theory to create an efficient brain stimulation system. To read the underlying neuronal condition from the electrical activity of neurons, a sensor, sensor interface circuit, and signal conditioning are needed. Also, efficient feature extraction, classification, and control algorithms should be in place to interpret and use the sensed data for closing the feedback loop...

Texture analysis describes a variety of image analysis techniques that quantify the variation in intensity and pattern. This paper provides an overview of several texture analysis approaches addressing the rationale supporting them, their advantages, drawbacks, and applications. This survey's emphasis is in collecting and categorising over five decades of active research on texture analysis. Brief descriptions of different approaches are presented along with application examples. From a broad range of texture analysis applications, this survey's final focus is on biomedical image analysis...

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has caused a pandemic since early 2020. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has already caused more than three million deaths worldwide and affected people's physical and mental health. COVID-19 patients with mild symptoms are generally required to self-isolate and monitor for symptoms at least for 14 days in the case the disease turns towards severe complications. In this work, we overviewed the impact of COVID-19 on the patients' general health with a focus on their cardiovascular, respiratory and mental health, and investigated several existing patient monitoring systems...

COVID-19 is a life threatening disease which has a enormous global impact. As the cause of the disease is a novel coronavirus whose gene information is unknown, drugs and vaccines are yet to be found. For the present situation, disease spread analysis and prediction with the help of mathematical and data driven model will be of great help to initiate prevention and control action, namely lockdown and qurantine. There are various mathematical and machine-learning models proposed for analyzing the spread and prediction...

Since the advent of U-Net, fully convolutional deep neural networks and its many variants have completely changed the modern landscape of deep-learning based medical image segmentation. However, the over-dependence of these methods on pixel-level classification and regression has been identified early on as a problem. Especially when trained on medical databases with sparse available annotation, these methods are prone to generate segmentation artifacts such as fragmented structures, topological inconsistencies and islands of pixel...

Over the last decade, stem cell-associated therapies are widely used because of their potential in self-renewable and multipotent differentiation ability. Stem cells have become more attractive for aesthetic uses and plastic surgery, including scar reduction, breast augmentation, facial contouring, hand rejuvenation, and anti-aging. The current preclinical and clinical studies of stem cells on aesthetic uses also showed promising outcomes. Adipose-derived stem cells are commonly used for fat grafting that demonstrated scar improvement, anti-aging, skin rejuvenation properties, etc...

Healthcare agents, in particular in the oncology field, are currently collecting vast amounts of diverse patient data. In this context, some decision-support systems, mostly based on deep learning techniques, have already been approved for clinical purposes. Despite all the efforts in introducing artificial intelligence methods in the workflow of clinicians, its lack of interpretability - understand how the methods make decisions - still inhibits their dissemination in clinical practice. The aim of this article is to present an easy guide for oncologists explaining how these methods make decisions and illustrating the strategies to explain them...

Graph networks can model the data observed across different levels of biological systems that span from the population graph (with patients as network nodes) to the molecular graphs that involve omics data. Graph-based approaches have shed light on decoding biological processes modulated by complex interactions. This paper systematically reviews the graph-based analysis methods, including Graph Signal Processing (GSP), Graph Neural Network (GNN), and graph topology inference methods, and their applications to biological data...

The rapid growth in wearable biosensing devices is pushed by the strong desire to monitor the human health data and to predict the disease at an early stage. Different sensors are developed to monitor various biomarkers through wearable and implantable sensing patches. Temperature sensor has proved to be an important physiological parameter amongst the various wearable biosensing patches. This paper highlights the recent progresses made in printing of functional nanomaterials for developing wearable temperature sensors on polymeric substrates...

Optical pulse detection photoplethysmography (PPG) provides a means of low cost and unobtrusive physiological monitoring that is popular in many wearable devices. However, the accuracy, robustness and generalizability of single-wavelength PPG sensing are sensitive to biological characteristics as well as sensor configuration and placement; this is significant given the increasing adoption of single-wavelength wrist-worn PPG devices in clinical studies and healthcare. Since different wavelengths interact with the skin to varying degrees, researchers have explored the use of multi-wavelength PPG to improve sensing accuracy, robustness and generalizability...