Journal of Medical Engineering

This paper examines the question;" does permanent laser marking affect the mechanical performance of a metallic medical component?" The literature review revealed the surprising fact that very little has been presented or studied even though intuition suggests that its effect could be detrimental to a component's fatigue life. A brief investigation of laser marking suggests that defects greater than 25 μm are possible. A theoretical investigation further suggests that this is unlikely to cause issues with relation to fast fracture but is highly likely to cause fatigue life issues...

Cell patterning has emerged as an elegant tool in developing cellular arrays, bioreactors, biosensors, and lab-on-chip devices and for use in engineering neotissue for repair or regeneration. In this study, micropatterned surfaces were created using the layer-by-layer lift-off (LbL-LO) method for analyzing canine chondrocytes response to patterned substrates. Five materials were chosen based on our previous studies. These included: poly(dimethyldiallylammonium chloride) (PDDA), poly(ethyleneimine) (PEI), poly(styrene sulfonate) (PSS), collagen, and chondroitin sulfate (CS)...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of stereoscopic display alignment errors on visual fatigue and prefrontal cortical tissue hemodynamic responses. We collected hemodynamic data and perceptual ratings of visual fatigue while participants performed visual display tasks on 8 ft × 6 ft NEC LT silver screen with NEC LT 245 DLP projectors. There was statistical significant difference between subjective measures of visual fatigue before air traffic control task (BATC) and after air traffic control task (ATC 3), (P < 0...

Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations results are herein incorporated into an electrostatic model used to determine the structure of an effective polymer-based antidote to the anticoagulant fondaparinux. In silico data for the polymer or its cationic binding groups has not, up to now, been available, and experimental data on the structure of the polymer-fondaparinux complex is extremely limited. Consequently, the task of optimizing the polymer structure is a daunting challenge. MD simulations provided a means to gain microscopic information on the interactions of the binding groups and fondaparinux that would have otherwise been inaccessible...

An MR acquisition protocol and a processing method using distributed computing on the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) to allow 3D liver perfusion parametric mapping after Magnetic Resonance Dynamic Contrast Enhanced (MR-DCE) imaging are presented. Seven patients (one healthy control and six with chronic liver diseases) were prospectively enrolled after liver biopsy. MR-dynamic acquisition was continuously performed in free-breathing during two minutes after simultaneous intravascular contrast agent (MS-325 blood pool agent) injection...

A novel control methodology which uses a low-resolution encoder is presented for a cellular microinjection technology called the Ros-Drill (rotationally oscillating drill). It is developed primarily for ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection) operations, with the objective of generating a desired oscillatory motion at the tip of a micro glass pipette. It is an inexpensive setup, which creates high-frequency (higher than 500 Hz) and small-amplitude (around 0.2 deg) rotational oscillations at the tip of an injection pipette...

The aim of this paper is applying the bispectral analysis on widespread diffuse cross-frequency interactive effects. The event-related potentials (ERPs) research method was used in this study and it could collect the widespread diffuse cross-frequency from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients' brain wave. In this study, the brain wave data were collected from 12 MCI subjects, 12 healthy elderly, and 12 healthy young. The findings showed that the decreased interhemispheric coherence of 8.8 Hz for MCI compared with healthy elderly in the central-parietal cortex to respective surrounding sites and each MCI subject showed significantly widespread diffuse pattern of cross-frequency interactions in comparison with the healthy controls in the left central-parietal and right frontal...

A variety of blood vessel extraction (BVE) techniques exist in the literature, but they do not always lead to acceptable solutions especially in the presence of anomalies where the reported work is limited. Four techniques are presented for BVE: (1) BVE using Image Line Cross-Sections (ILCS), (2) BVE using Edge Enhancement and Edge Detection (EEED), (3) BVE using Modified Matched Filtering (MMF), and (4) BVE using Continuation Algorithm (CA). These four techniques have been designed especially for abnormal retinal images containing low vessel contrasts, drusen, exudates, and other artifacts...

We propose a new markerless tracking technique of lung tumor motion by using an X-ray fluoroscopic image sequence for real-time image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT). A core innovation of the new technique is to extract a moving tumor intensity component from the fluoroscopic image intensity. The fluoroscopic intensity is the superimposition of intensity components of all the structures passed through by the X-ray. The tumor can then be extracted by decomposing the fluoroscopic intensity into the tumor intensity component and the others...

Background. With the current lack of clinically relevant classification methods of septal deviation, computer-generated models are important, as septal cartilage is indistinguishable on current imaging methods, making preoperative planning difficult. Methods. Three-dimensional models of the septum were created from a CT scan, and incremental forces were applied. Results. Regardless of the force direction, with increasing force, the septum first tilts (type I) and then crumples into a C shape (type II) and finally into an S shape (type III)...

Phantoms are essentially required to generate boundary data for studying the inverse solver performance in electrical impedance tomography (EIT). A MATLAB-based boundary data simulator (BDS) is developed to generate accurate boundary data using neighbouring current pattern for assessing the EIT inverse solvers. Domain diameter, inhomogeneity number, inhomogeneity geometry (shape, size, and position), background conductivity, and inhomogeneity conductivity are all set as BDS input variables. Different sets of boundary data are generated by changing the input variables of the BDS, and resistivity images are reconstructed using electrical impedance tomography and diffuse optical tomography reconstruction software (EIDORS)...

The airflow perturbation device (APD) has been developed as a portable, easy to use, and a rapid response instrument for measuring respiratory resistance in humans. However, the APD has limited data validating it against the established techniques. This study used a mechanical system to simulate the normal range of human breathing to validate the APD with the clinically accepted impulse oscillometry (IOS) technique. The validation system consisted of a sinusoidal flow generator with ten standardized resistance configurations that were shown to represent a total range of resistances from 0...

Background. A caries lesion causes changes in the optical properties of the affected tissue. Currently a caries lesion can be detected only at a relatively late stage of development. Caries diagnosis also suffers from high interobserver variance. Methods. This is a pilot study to test the suitability of an optical diffuse reflectance spectroscopy for caries diagnosis. Reflectance visible/near-infrared spectroscopy (VIS/NIRS) was used to measure caries lesions and healthy enamel on extracted human teeth. The results were analysed with a computational algorithm in order to find a rule-based classification method to detect caries lesions...

A new methodology for automatic feature extraction from biomedical images and subsequent classification is presented. The approach exploits the spatial orientation of high-frequency textural features of the processed image as determined by a two-step process. First, the two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is applied to obtain the HH high-frequency subband image. Then, a Gabor filter bank is applied to the latter at different frequencies and spatial orientations to obtain new Gabor-filtered image whose entropy and uniformity are computed...