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Currently studies on microstructures of human internal organs and their morphometry are conducted with the use of high level methodological tools such as stereometry, ultrastereometry and mathematic models of their pathological changes have been developed for accurate diagnosing.

Intellectual property laws are concerned with the legal regulation of mental products, and they facilitate the cooperation of industry and academia. However, training of Engineering and Science students in these areas is rather neglected worldwide. Therefore, an appropriate course on Intellectual Property (IP) Rights for graduating Biomedical Engineering students has been developed and is being offered in our Department since 2003. The developed course approaches intellectual property as a regulatory system, balancing incentives to foster human creativity, while at the same time is seeking not to unduly restrict its diffusion. It focuses mainly on Biomedical Science and Technology issues, and it attempts to combine practice-directed material with public policy concerns. The course lasts a semester, and addresses all relevant aspects of IP such as, the origin and the historical development of Intellectual Property protection, Trade Secrets, Trademark Rights of Publicity and Moral Rights, Copyright, Patent International Protection, Licensing, Royalties, etc. Special care is taken in training on Biomedical Technology Equipment classification, information retrieval out of patent documents, and their in research projects, by the employment of the specialized Internet based search-engines. Finally, ethical and social issues, concerning Intellectual property in Biomedical Sciences are systematically taken into account. The response to the course was positive, and about 30 students are being trained every academic semester.

SENTINEL is a Coordinated Action funded by the European Commission under the specific program (EURATOM) for research and training in the nuclear energy field as part of the 6th Framework Program.

The project deals with radiation protection, safety and related issues that arise as a result of new developments in equipment, digital imaging, medical devices and information technology industries, paralleled by novel practices and modalities. In practice, this project deals with almost all-radiological digital imaging, outside of Computed Tomography.

This project is important as at present developments are entirely driven by combined and essential global forces of the industry on one hand and the clinical users on the other hand. There has been no parallel action in research on the protection, safety, efficacy, optimization, justification or ethical issues, despite a certain amount of regulatory development. This deficit is now evident, as day-to-day practice has outpaced the available statutory safety and standards framework. The undertakings of the project covers:

The project underwrites the safety, efficacy and ethical aspects of clinical practice while protecting and adding value to the products and of the associated knowledge based equipment, information technology and service industries.

The Coordination Action is divided into eight distinct but interrelated Work Packages: Functional Performance and Standards; Efficacy and Safety in Digital Radiology, Dentistry and Nuclear Medicine; Efficacy and Safety in Cardiology; Efficacy and Safety in Interventional Radiology; Efficacy and Safety in Population Screening/Sensitive Groups; Good Practice Guidance and Training.

The intention of the present paper is to present the efforts of this Coordinated Action in the area of education and training.

The Electroneuromyography (ENMG) exams are achieved in order to detect neuromuscular lesions by means an electromyography equipment. The electromyography equipment is capable to detect the electric changes that happen at cellular level, during the nervous transmission and muscular contraction. These phenomena are transformed in electric signals, once amplified are shown in the equipment screen to be analyzed in order to provide a possible diagnosis. In order to be a support tool for the neurophysiology specialists in their studies and diagnoses, an ENMG Hypermedia tutorial system was developed. The system is divided in two parts: in the first one it is possible to observe and to research the electromyography techniques and in the second one, Electroneurography is contained where is possible to see the electrodes insertion point. It shows that the knowledge level integrated into the Hypermedia tutorial it is of great importance for students, and it can also be used by specialists in their consultations in order to consult or review data which difficulty are found digitalized. One of the main advantages of the Hypermedia tutorial system of ENMG is to show the whole theoretical part through illustrative forms, looking for an interaction with the medical specialist and the patient, seeking the best the content assimilation. The logical part of the system was developed using the programming tool Delphi, and the interactive part and graphic interface developed in Macromedia Flash. The criterion followed by this system was to build an easy navigation tool to the Neurophysiology area professionals. Due Electroneuromyography tests interests are growing, the specialists look for studies in this area in order to improve their knowledge of the technique. So, the ENMG Hypermedia tutorial system development, will be an alternative which will assist the several sections needs of the clinical area, related with Electroneurography and Electromyography.

The STI4-RT takes care of an IACVIRTUAL (Artificial Intelligence Applied at a Virtual Doctor’s Office Modeling and Implementation) line of work which is responsible for the development of a virtual environment for giving support to the learning process of cardiology and masthology students. To accomplish this goal, it was developed an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS), which is being the responsible for provide an interactive environment for this learning process. The construction of this ITS was based on some of theory fundamentals, like intelligent agents (under a multi-agents system approach), ontologies (for modeling the knowledge domain and pedagogical approaches), a proposal of system architecture called MATHEMA. Besides these technologies, it was used a Web layer to access the environment and a persistence layer for saving students learning information. The multi-agents system structure is used to map the architectural proposal into intelligent agents. Those agents interacts with the ontology modeling for using the most appropriate pedagogical approach to teach the domain concepts and use the persistence layer to register information about the student learning process. Through the Web Interface, the students send request solicitations for the agent container, and receive the response back from this container at the Web tear. The domain expert uses the agents to make maintenance at the domain modeling. The expert interference allows correction and evolutions to be done at the ontology content. At moment, the STI4-RT was tested for concepts related to the Thoracic Radiology medical specialty. Satisfactory results were obtained.

In an FPGA-based medical EIT system, the necessary sinusoidal signals are generated using DDS inside an FPGA. Similarly, the phase and amplitude of the acquired signal are measured by using an I/Q demodulator inside the FPGA. In a multi-channel EIT system, signal generation and measurement are required for every channel. To design a high performance multi-channel EIT system, signal generation and demodulation with a high SNR are required. These require a large number of logic gates in the FPGA. In this paper, optimizing the use of the FPGA to design a more efficient multi-channel EIT system in terms of cost, power consumption and size is discussed. The sinusoidal signal is generated with a high sampling frequency using the DDS technique, and has a 102dB SNR and a 50Hz frequency resolution. The result of frequency resolution is a trade-off to minimize the space consumption in the FPGA. In the design of the I/Q demodulation, the down-sampling technique is used which decreases the size of the multipliers. Moreover, it reduces the number of coefficients in the dual-channel low-pass filtering. The Optimal FIR filtering technique is used to design the low-pass filters. The resulting filters have 150dB SNR and 0.001 dB equirriple in the pass-band.

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT), a non-invasive technique used to image the electrical conductivity and permittivity within a body from measurements taken on the body’s surface, could be used as an indicator for breast cancer. Because of the low spatial resolution of EIT, combining it with other modalities may enhance its utility. X-ray mammography, the standard screening technique for breast cancer, is the first choice for that other modality. Here, we describe a radiolucent electrode array that can be attached to the compression plates of a mammography unit enabling EIT and mammography data to be taken simultaneously and inregister. The radiolucent electrode array is made by depositing thin layers of metal on a plastic substrate. The structure of the array is presented along with data showing its X-ray absorbance and electrical properties. The data show that the electrode array has satisfactory radiolucency and sufficiently low resistance.

Bladder pathology is usually investigated visually by cystoscopy and in this technique, erythematous areas of the human urothelium are usually seen by eye. However, these can represent different conditions ranging from simple inflammation to flat carcinoma-in-situ (CIS). Definitive diagnosis can be made by biopsy only, usually under general anaesthesia. The selection of biopsy sites depends on simple visual inspection thus is effectively random, and can be negative sometimes. This is a relatively high cost procedure in terms of both time and money and is associated with discomfort for the patient and morbidity. Therefore, the feasibility of adapting a minimally invasive technique to screen for bladder cancer has been explored and compared with histopathological evaluation of urinary bladder lesions at lower frequencies. However, the tight junctions of the epithelium affect the bladder tissue impedances at lower frequencies more than at higher frequencies. Thus, a low frequency impedance system, 62.5 Hz-1.5 MHz was used to investigate a good separation of impedance between malignant and benign areas of the bladder. The measured data of the bladders were separated using the pathological reports. After analyzing these data, there was found a significant difference between benign and malignant areas of the bladder especially at lower frequencies (p<0.0001). These results demonstrate the potential of electrical impedance system for developing a novel and minimally invasive tool for the identification, selection for sampling, screening and possible diagnosis of flat bladder lesions.

In this paper a novel conductivity reconstruction algorithm for MREIT was proposed. The algorithm can be implemented utilizing permanent magnetic resonance imaging system (Generally the main magnetic field is perpendicular to the horizontal plane.). We distribute the electrodes on the boundary of the selected slice which is not perpendicular to the main magnetic field. The magnetic flux density induced by the applied currents in the selected slice has a component in the direction of the main magnetic field and the component can be measured. Then the equation expressing the relation between the conductivity and the measured magnetic flux density was obtained. In order to guarantee the uniqueness of the reconstructed conductivity, two different solutions were given. The corresponding algorithm was proposed and analyzed. The performance of the algorithm was also discussed.

To make electrical impedance tomography (EIT) measurements, we inject currents into a volume through electrodes, then measure the voltages at the electrodes. In this paper we introduce an 8-electrode EIT measurement system which is completely portable and is based on a PDA instead of a PC. The system is composed of a data acquisition board (E-Pack), a current source, a PDA and software, which was developed in eVC 4.0. The E-pack collects data through a pre-amplifier. The signal is then sampled and demodulated with an AD9240 ADC with 14-bit resolution and 10msps speed, and finally completed through 32 point sampling in the digital signal processor (DSP). For the DSP, we have chosen an Analog Devices ADSP-2181. Custom designed protocol between the PDA and E-Pack enables selection of any current drive and measurement electrode pairs. Images can be reconstructed and displayed on the PDA. We present experimental results for a cylindrical phantom that demonstrate the performance and applicability of our system. Measurements on a 50Ω resistor network show that the precision of our system is better than 0.2%.