Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The research on digital visible human is of great significance and application value. The US VHP created the first digital image data set of complete human (male and female) in 1995. To promote worldwide application-oriented VHR, more visible human data sets representative of different populations of the world are in demand. The Chinese Visible Human (CVH) male (created in Oct. 2002) and female (created in Feb. 2003) project achieved greater integrity of images, easier blood vessel identification, and were free of organic lesion. The most noteworthy technical advance of CVH Project was construction of a low temperature laboratory, which contributed to prevention of small structures (including teeth, concha nasalis, and articular cartilage) from falling off of the milling surface. Thus, better integrity of images was ensured. So far, we have achieved acquisition of five CVH data sets and their volume visualization on PC. 3D reconstruction of some organs or structures has been finished. The work of segmentation of a complete data set is also under way. Although there is still a distance to go to make visible human meet the application-oriented needs in various fields, we’re taking our first step toward future application by acquiring new data sets, performing segmentation and setting up a platform of computer-assisted medicine.

Users’ perceptions of the appearance and the usability of an interactive system are two integral parts that contribute to the users’ experience of the system. “Actual usability” represents a system value that is revealed either during usability testing and related methods by experts or during use by the target users. Perceived usability is an assumption about a systems’ usability that has been made prior to, or independent of, its use. The appearance of a product can inadvertently affect its perceived usability; however, their relationship has not been systematically explored. We describe an approach that uses “perceptual maps” to visualize the relationship between perceived usability and subjective appearance. A group of professional designers rated representative car infotainment systems for their subjective appearance; a group of usability experts rated the same models for their perceived usability. We applied multidimensional scaling (MDS) to project the ratings into the same Euclidean space. The results show certain overlap between the perceptions of product appearance and usability. The implications of this approach for designing interactive systems are discussed.

The Physiome is an umbrella term that refers to human modelling with mathematics and computational methods, accommodating cross-disciplinary science (chemistry, biology, physics) and a breadth of dimensional and temporal scale (sub-cellular to organs, sub-microsecond to tens-of-years). The Virtual Physiological Human is a European initiative that is intended to provide a unifying architecture for the integration and cooperation of multi-scale physiome models, thereby creating a predictive platform for the description of human beings . Unlike the Genome, the challenge of the Physiome may be almost unbounded, as the desire for increased detail imposes a continuing pressure for ever-finer data granularity, and the necessary Information Technology (IT) infrastructure spawns innovations that surpass conventional solutions. It is foreseen that maturing physiome activities will increasingly influence medicine, biomedical research and commercial developments, and the central role of IT highlights the need for a specific and robust IT infrastructure.

The European Commission has experience of supporting challenging technical endeavours through its Framework Programmes of research, and in the forthcoming 7th Framework Programme, it will invite researchers from within and outside Europe to unite in seeking solutions to key issues of the Physiome. The Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) investment programme will establish the necessary infrastructure and address the grand technical challenges identified by experts. This paper examines the background to the strategy and the ways in which the programme’s structure has been determined.

The work presented in this paper refers to the implementation of a product development process based on the use of virtual model of the human body to design specific custom-fit product, such as a prosthesis socket (interface between the residual limb and the mechanical part of the prosthesis). It considers the integration of advanced ICT tools coming from the reverse engineering, the physics-based modelling and simulation, and the rapid prototyping fields. The paper describes problems related to the implementation of each step within a real socket development process.

Tumour growth and response to radiotherapeutic schemes is a markedly multiscale process which by no means can be reduced to only molecular or cellular events. Within this framework a new scientific area, i.e. oncology has been proposed in order to address the previously mentioned hypercomplex process at essentially all levels of biocomplexity. This paper focuses on the case of imageable glioblastoma mulriforme response to radiotherapy and presents the basics of an essentially top-down modelling approach, aiming at an improved undestanding of cancer and at a patient-specific optimization of treatment.

To determine ways of improving a user interface – so that a person’s task produces fewer errors or takes less time – is a major goal of user interface designers. Usability testing is an established and proven method for revealing these user performance metrics, but is rather time-consuming, resource intensive and requires at least functional prototypes. Therefore, it may not always be the optimal choice during the development of very complex, expensive and context-specific applications like those in medical imaging. A promising alternative is to simulate user performance with computational models based on psychological models. In this paper the , which was developed based on Card, Moran and Newell’s (1980) Keystroke Level Model for estimating user performance with medical imaging systems, is introduced for the first time.

Support properties in the lumbar area have been identified as a major factor for the comfort impression on automotive seats. However, the relationship of human body characteristics to specific properties of seats is not clear. Ongoing research at L&P Automotive Group analyzes seat dimensions and human body characteristics in order to evaluate the man-machine interface of the seated human. Computer tools employed are 3D measuring systems, pressure mapping and subjective comfort assessment. Specific measurement routines have been developed to allow for correlation of human dimensions and seat characteristics. Using computer supported methods for measuring, data collection and data processing in combination with engineering knowledge and knowledge about other soft facts, comfort assessment processes can be developed and effectively used in order to obtain better, meaning more comfortable products.

Children are often forced into mainstream schools while special needs schools are being shut down. Children with phonological disorders in mainstream schools go through fear, shame and frustration of not being understood or misunderstood. The proposed research attempts to address this issue by way of designing and developing a prototype for an assistive device that would help special needs children in mainstream education. This will also help children overcome problems that result from lack of confidence. This work has been very much a pioneering work and has achieved the target it pursued.

Efficient and effective analysis of large datasets from microarray gene expression data is one of the keys to time-critical personalized medicine. The issue we address here is the scalability of the data processing software for clustering gene expression data into groups with homogeneous expression profile. In this paper we propose , a novel clustering algorithm based on a combination of the Furthest-Point-First (FPF) heuristic for solving the -center problem and a stability-based method for determining the number of clusters . Our algorithm improves the state of the art: it is scalable to large datasets without sacrificing output quality.

The contact behaviors of in vivo knee during weight bearing were quantified using MRI-based 3D knee model. The model included the cortical and trabecular bone of the femur and tibia, cartilage of the femoral condyles and tibial plateau, both the medial and lateral menisci with their horn attachments. Explicit dynamic nonlinear finite element techniques were discussed to simulate biomechanical features of tibio-femeral joint under different loads condition, considering the relative slide and friction existing in the knee. The simulating results show that the contact area increased while the loads increased. Both the ratio of the contact area and the ratio of contact force of medial and laterial tibial plateau were almost constant under the different loads along the axis of the tibia during the supporting phase in a gait, and yet the contact points of the compressive force were changed.