This book concentrates on the design and development of integrated optic waveguide sensors using silicon based materials. The implementation of such system as a tool for detecting adulteration in petroleum based products as well as its use for detection of glucose level in diabetes are highlighted. The first chapters are dedicated to the development of the theoretical model while the final chapters are focused on the different applications of such sensors. It gives the readers the full background in the field of sensors, reasons for using silicon oxynitride as a potential waveguide material as well as its fabrication processes and possible uses.

The present set of lectures and tutorial reviews deals with various topical aspects related to instabilities of interfacial processes and driven flows from both the theoretical and experimental point of views. New research has been spurred by demands for many applications in material sciences (melting, solidification, electro deposition), biomedical engineering and processing in microgravity environments. This book is intended as both a modern source of reference for researchers in the field as well as an introduction to postgraduate students and non-specialists from related areas.

Neural activity in the human brain generates coherent synaptic and intracellular currents in cortical columns that create electromagnetic signals which can be measured outside the head using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG). Electromagnetic brain imaging refers to techniques that reconstruct neural activity from MEG and EEG signals. Electromagnetic brain imaging is unique among functional imaging techniques for its ability to provide spatio-temporal brain activation profiles that reflect not only where the activity occurs in the brain but also when this activity occurs in relation to external and internal cognitive events, as well as to activity in other brain regions. Adaptive spatial filters are powerful algorithms for electromagnetic brain imaging that enable high-fidelity reconstruction of neuronal activity. This book describes the technical advances of adaptive spatial filters for electromagnetic brain imaging by integrating and synthesizing available information and describes various factors that affect its performance. The intended audience include graduate students and researchers interested in the methodological aspects of electromagnetic brain imaging.

This book raises questions about the changing relationships between technology, people and health. It examines the accelerating pace of technological development and a general shift to personalized, patient-led medicine. Such relationships are increasingly mediated through particular medical technologies, drawn together by the authors as 'personal medical devices' (PMDs) - devices that are attached to, worn by, interacted with, or carried by individuals for the purposes of generating biomedical data and carrying out medical interventions on the person concerned. The burgeoning PMD field is advancing rapidly across multiple domains and disciplines - so rapidly that conceptual and empirical research and thinking around PMDs, and their clinical, social and philosophical implications, often lag behind new technical developments and medical interventions. This timely and original volume explores the significant and under-researched impact of personal medical devices on contemporary understandings of health and illness. It will be a valuable read for scholars and practitioners of medicine, health, science and technology and social science.

Research on bacterial adhesion and its significance is a major field involving many different aspects of nature and human life, such as marine science, soil and plant ecology, most importantly, the biomedical field. The adhesion ofbacteria to the food industry, and human tissue surfaces and implanted biomaterial surfaces is an important step in the patho genesis of infection. Handbook 0/ Bacterial Adhesion: Principles, Methods, and Applications is an outgrowth of the editors' own quest for information on laboratory techniques for studying bacte rial adhesion to biomaterials, bone, and other tissues and, more importantly, a response to significant needs in the research community. This book is designed to be an experimental guide for biomedical scientists, biomaterials scientists, students, laboratory technicians, or anyone who plans to conduct bacterial adhesion studies. More specifically, it is intended for all those researchers facing the chal lenge of implant infections in such devices as orthopedic prostheses, cardiovascular devices or catheters, cerebrospinal fluid shunts or extradural catheters, thoracic or abdominal catheters, portosystemic shunts or bile stents, urological catheters or stents, plastic surgical implants, oral or maxillofacial implants, contraceptive implants, or even contact lenses. It also covers research methods for the study of bacterial adhesion to tis sues such as teeth, respiratory mucosa, intestinal mucosa, and the urinary tract. In short, it constitutes a handbook for biomechanical and bioengineering researchers and students at all levels."

This book gathers together contributions from internationally renowned authors in the field of cardiovascular systems and provides crucial insight into the importance of sex- and gender-concepts during the analysis of patient data. This innovative title is the first to offer the elements necessary to consider sex-related properties in both clinical and basic studies regarding the heart and circulation on multiscale levels (i.e. molecular, cellular, electrophysiologically, neuroendocrine, immunoregulatory, organ, allometric, and modeling). Observed differences at (ultra)cellular and organ level are quantified, with focus on clinical relevance and implications for diagnosis and patient management. Since the cardiovascular system is of vital importance for all tissues, Sex-Specific Analysis of Cardiovascular Function is an essential source of information for clinicians, biologists, and biomedical investigators. The wide spectrum of differences described in this book will also act as an eye-opener and serve as a handbook for students, teachers, scientists and practitioners.

This book introduces approaches that have the potential to transform the daily practice of psychiatrists and psychologists. This includes the asynchronous communication between mental health care providers and clients as well as the automation of assessment and therapy.

Speech and language are particularly interesting from the viewpoint of psychological assessment. For instance, depression may change the characteristics of voice in individuals and these changes can be detected by a special form of speech analysis. Computational screening methods that utilize speech and language can detect subtle changes and alert clinicians as well as individuals and caregivers.

The use of online technologies in mental health, however, poses ethical problems that will occupy concerned individuals, governments and the wider public for some time. Assuming that these ethical problems can be solved, it should be possible to diagnose and treat mental health disorders online (excluding the use of medication).

Speech and language are particularly interesting from the viewpoint of psychological assessment. For instance, depression may change the characteristics of voice in individuals and these changes can be detected by a special form of speech analysis. Computational screening methods that utilize speech and language can detect subtle changes and alert clinicians as well as individuals and caregivers.

The use of online technologies in mental health, however, poses ethical problems that will occupy concerned individuals, governments and the wider public for some time. Assuming that these ethical problems can be solved, it should be possible to diagnose and treat mental health disorders online (excluding the use of medication).

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the potential use of graphene-based materials in two important societal areas: medicine and the environment. It discusses how new graphene-based materials can be creatively used for biological purposes, for example as delivery vehicles for diagnostics or therapeutics, ultrasensitive sensors, smart responsive substrates for artificial-tissue design and biomarkers. Moreover, it presents new insights into their use as sorbent or photocatalytic materials for environmental decontamination in water and gas-phase desalination membranes and as sensors for contaminant monitoring, giving relevance to the current discussions on the possible toxicological effects of graphene-based materials.

The authors of this book analyze the influence of specific everyday life situations and contexts on the emotional state of people and the ways in which this can impact measurements of user experience. The book anticipates a future in which products and machines know how we feel and adapt to the feelings they sense (music systems that effectively enhance our current mood with a personalized choice of music, computer dialogues that avoid upcoming frustration, and photo cameras that take pictures whenever we're excited). In all these situations, knowledge of the emotional state of the user is prime information. A previous book published in the Philips Research Book Series, "Probing Experience," illustrated ways to evaluate the user experience through behavioural and physiological parameters. The present book focuses on the influence of context in these measurements. The everyday-life contexts of future products and machines will be always specific, especially in comparison to the standard laboratory situation. Context can impact the experience measurements and influence the occurrence and characteristics of certain signals. On the other hand, independent knowledge of the context could be very valuable for the interpretation of experience measurements. This book provides an overview of the present knowledge on the impact of context, and advocates the need for a joint understanding of its role in the measurement of experience. The authors comprise many experienced researchers on this topic with a wide variety of backgrounds, including business and academia, covering a broad range of context situations.

This doctoral thesis reports on an innovative data repository offering adaptive metadata management to maximise information sharing and comprehension in multidisciplinary and geographically distributed collaborations. It approaches metadata as a fluid, loosely structured and dynamical process rather than a fixed product, and describes the development of a novel data management platform based on a schemaless JSON data model, which represents the first fully JSON-based metadata repository designed for the biomedical sciences. Results obtained in various application scenarios (e.g. integrated biobanking, functional genomics and computational neuroscience) and corresponding performance tests are reported on in detail. Last but not least, the book offers a systematic overview of data platforms commonly used in the biomedical sciences, together with a fresh perspective on the role of and tools for data sharing and heterogeneous data integration in contemporary biomedical research.

As a new interdisciplinary research area, image-based geometric modeling and mesh generation integrates image processing, geometric modeling and mesh generation with finite element method (FEM) to solve problems in computational biomedicine, materials sciences and engineering. It is well known that FEM is currently well-developed and efficient, but mesh generation for complex geometries (e.g., the human body) still takes about 80% of the total analysis time and is the major obstacle to reduce the total computation time. It is mainly because none of the traditional approaches is sufficient to effectively construct finite element meshes for arbitrarily complicated domains, and generally a great deal of manual interaction is involved in mesh generation.

This contributed volume, the first for such an interdisciplinary topic, collects the latest research by experts in this area. These papers cover a broad range of topics, including medical imaging, image alignment and segmentation, image-to-mesh conversion, quality improvement, mesh warping, heterogeneous materials, biomodelcular modeling and simulation, as well as medical and engineering applications.

This contributed volume, the first for such an interdisciplinary topic, collects the latest research by experts in this area. These papers cover a broad range of topics, including medical imaging, image alignment and segmentation, image-to-mesh conversion, quality improvement, mesh warping, heterogeneous materials, biomodelcular modeling and simulation, as well as medical and engineering applications.

This contributed volume, the first for such an interdisciplinary topic, collects the latest research by experts in this area. These papers cover a broad range of topics, including medical imaging, image alignment and segmentation, image-to-mesh conversion, quality improvement, mesh warping, heterogeneous materials, biomodelcular modeling and simulation, as well as medical and engineering applications.

This contributed volume, the first for such an interdisciplinary topic, collects the latest research by experts in this area. These papers cover a broad range of topics, including medical imaging, image alignment and segmentation, image-to-mesh conversion, quality improvement, mesh warping, heterogeneous materials, biomodelcular modeling and simulation, as well as medical and engineering applications.

Pediatric Injury Biomechanics: Archive and Textbook consolidates and describes the current state of the art in pediatric injury biomechanics research in the automotive crash environment. Written by the most respected scientists in the field, the objective of this ground-breaking project is to provide a comprehensive archive and analysis of pediatric injury biomechanics research; to be the go-to reference for the epidemiology of motor vehicle related childhood injury data, pediatric anthropometry, pediatric biomechanical properties, tissue tolerance, and computational models. This book provides essential information needed by researchers working in the field of pediatric injury including those involved in rulemaking activities, injury criteria development, child dummy development, and child injury interventions development. In addition to the text, a companion archive will include valuable information and tools to assist in the identification of gaps in research and future research directions.This living document will be regularly updated with current research and advancements in pediatric injury biomechanics.

This book presents a comprehensive and unifying approach to analytical identification of material properties of biological materials. Focusing on depth-sensing indentation testing, pipette aspiration testing, and torsion of soft tissues, it discusses the following important aspects in detail: damping, adhesion, thickness effect, substrate effect, elastic inhomogeneity effect, and biphasic effect. This book is intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, researchers in the area of biomechanics as well as for biomedical engineers interested in contact problems and involved in inverse materials parameters prediction analysis.

This book contains original articles submitted to the Seventh International Conference on Cognitive Neurodynamics (ICCN 2019). The brain is an endless case study of a complex system characterized by multiple levels of integration, multiple time scales of activity, and multiple coding and decoding properties. The contribution of several disciplines, mathematics, physics, computer science, neurobiology, pharmacology, physiology, and behavioral and clinical sciences, is necessary in order to cope with such seemingly unattainable complexity that transforms the experimental information into a tricky puzzle which hides the correspondence with model predictions. This conference gathered active participants to discuss ideas and pose new questions from different viewpoints, ranging from single neurons and neural networks to animal/human behavior in theoretical and experimental studies. The conference is organized with plenary lectures, mini-symposia, interdisciplinary round tables, and oral and poster sessions.

This book discusses the recent innovations in the development of various advanced biopolymeric systems, including gels, in situ gels, hydrogels, interpenetrating polymer networks (IPNs), polyelectrolyte complexes (PECs), graft co-polymers, stimuli-responsive polymers, polymeric nanoparticles, nanocomposites, polymeric micelles, dendrimers, liposomes and scaffolds. It also examines their applications in drug delivery.

This book provides a comprehensive review of biosynthetic approaches to the production of industrially important chemicals and the environmental challenges involved. Its 19 chapters discuss different aspects of biosynthetic technology from the perspective of leading experts in the field. It covers various biorefinery approaches, including the use of microbes, metabolically engineered plants, biomass-based and green technology methods. Further, it examines important research in the areas of organic and hazardous waste composting, management and recovery of nutraceuticals from agro-industrial waste, biosynthesis and technological advancements of biosurfactants and waste water bioremediation. This book contributes to the scientific literature on biosynthetic technologies and the related environmental challenges for researchers and academics working in this area around the globe.

One of the greatest challenges for mechanical engineers is to extend the success of computational mechanics to fields outside traditional engineering, in particular to biology, biomedical sciences, and medicine. This book is an opportunity for computational biomechanics specialists to present and exchange opinions on the opportunities of applying their techniques to computer-integrated medicine. Computational Biomechanics for Medicine: Models, Algorithms and Implementation collects the papers from the Seventh Computational Biomechanics for Medicine Workshop held in Nice in conjunction with the Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention conference. The topics covered include: medical image analysis, image-guided surgery, surgical simulation, surgical intervention planning, disease prognosis and diagnostics, injury mechanism analysis, implant and prostheses design, and medical robotics.

This book is a timely report on current neurotechnology research. It presents a snapshot of the state of the art in the field, discusses current challenges and identifies new directions. The book includes a selection of extended and revised contributions presented at the 2nd International Congress on Neurotechnology, Electronics and Informatics (NEUROTECHNIX 2014), held October 25-26 in Rome, Italy. The chapters are varied: some report on novel theoretical methods for studying neuronal connectivity or neural system behaviour; others report on advanced technologies developed for similar purposes; while further contributions concern new engineering methods and technological tools supporting medical diagnosis and neurorehabilitation. All in all, this book provides graduate students, researchers and practitioners dealing with different aspects of neurotechnologies with a unified view of the field, thus fostering new ideas and research collaborations among groups from different disciplines.

Current demographic, economic and social conditions which developed countries are faced with require a paradigm change for delivering high quality and efficient health services. In that context, healthcare systems have to turn from organization-centered to process-oriented and finally towards individualized patient care, also called personal care, based on ehealth platform services. Interoperability requirements for ubiquitous personalized health services reach beyond current concepts of health information integration among professional stakeholders and related Electronic Patient Records.Future personal health platforms particularly have to maintain semantic interoperability among systems using different modalities and technologies, different knowledge representation and domain experts' languages as well as different coding schemes and terminologies to include home care, as well as personal and mobile systems. This development is not restricted to regions or countries, but appears globally, requiring a comprehensive international collaboration. This publication within the series "Studies in Health Technology and Informatics" presents papers from leading international experts representing all domains involved in ehealth.

The main objective in the rehabilitation of people following amputation is to restore or improve their functioning, which includes their return to work. Full-time employment leads to beneficial health effects and being healthy leads to increased chances of full-time employment (Ross and Mirowskay 1995). Employment of disabled people enhances their self-esteem and reduces social isolation (Dougherty 1999). The importance of returning to work for people following amputation the- fore has to be considered. Perhaps the first article about reemployment and problems people may have at work after amputation was published in 1955 (Boynton 1955). In later years, there have been sporadic studies on this topic. Greater interest and more studies about returning to work and problems people have at work following amputation arose in the 1990s and has continued in recent years (Burger and Marinc ?ek 2007). These studies were conducted in different countries on all the five continents, the greatest number being carried out in Europe, mainly in the Netherlands and the UK (Burger and Marinc ?ek 2007). Owing to the different functions of our lower and upper limbs, people with lower limb amputations have different activity limitations and participation restrictions compared to people with upper limb amputations. Both have problems with driving and carrying objects. People with lower limb amputations also have problems standing, walking, running, kicking, turning and stamping, whereas people with upper limb amputations have problems grasping, lifting, pushing, pulling, writing, typing, and pounding (Giridhar et al. 2001).

Myocardial tissue engineering (MTE), a strategy that uses materials or material/cell constructs to prolong patients' life after cardiac damage by supporting or restoring heart function, is continuously improving. Common MTE strategies include an engineered vehicle', which may be a porous scaffold or a dense substrate or patch, made of either natural or synthetic polymeric materials. The function of the substrate is to aid transportation of cells into the diseased region of the heart and support their integration. This book, which contains chapters written by leading experts in MTE, gives a complete analysis of the area and presents the latest advances in the field. The chapters cover all relevant aspects of MTE strategies, including cell sources, specific TE techniques and biomaterials used. Many different cell types have been suggested for cell therapy in the framework of MTE, including autologous bone marrow-derived or cardiac progenitors, as well as embryonic or induced pluripotent stem cells, each having their particular advantages and disadvantages. The book also considers a complete range of biomaterials, examining different aspects of their application in MTE, such as biocompatibility with cardiac cells, mechanical capability and compatibility with the mechanical properties of the native myocardium as well as degradation behaviour in vivo and in vitro. Although a great deal of research is being carried out in the field, this book also addresses many questions that still remain unanswered and highlights those areas in which further research efforts are required. The book will also give an insight into clinical trials and possible novel cell sources for cell therapy in MTE.

This book highlights the wide applications of nanomaterials in healthcare and environmental remediation. Presenting nano-based materials that positively influence the growth and proliferation of cells present in soft and hard tissue and are used for the regeneration bone tissue and/or suppression of cancer cells, it also discusses the natural products that can be incorporated in nanofibers for the treatment of cancer. Further, it describes the use of blending and functionalization to produce chitosan nanofibers for biomedical applications, and reviews the role of plasma-enhanced gold nanoparticles in diagnostics and therapeutics. Lastly, the book also introduces various nanotechnology approaches for the removal of waste metabolites in drinking water, and explores the emerging applications of nanorobotics in medicine. Given its scope, this book is a valuable resource for scientists, clinicians, engineers and researchers aiming to gain a better understanding of the various applications of nanotechnology.

Personalized health care to manage diseases and optimized treatment is crucial for everyone to maintain health quality. Significant efforts have been made to design and develop novel nano-enabling therapeutic strategies to cure and monitor diseases for personalized health care. As state-of-the-art, various strategies have been reported to develop personalized nanomedicine to combat against target diseases with no side effects. In this book proposal, we are trying to describe fundamentals of personalized nanomedicine, novel nanomaterials for drug delivery, role of nanotechnology for efficient therapeutics approach, nano-pharmacology, targeted CNS drug delivery, stimuli responsive drug release and nanotechnology for diseases management. This book would serve as a platform for new scholars to understand state-of-the-art of nanotechnology for therapeutics and designing their future research to develop effective personalized nanomedicine against targeted diseases. As of now, various studies have been reported to design and develop nanomedicines of higher efficacy but unfortunately, such products are up to laboratory research only and need to be well-tested using pre-clinical or human models. Our book would be a call for experts to explore multidisciplinary research for developing novel and efficient approaches to explore smart efficient nanocarriers for site-specific on-demand controlled drug delivery to combat against targeted diseases to personalized health care.

This book delves into the recent developments in the microscale and microfluidic technologies that allow manipulation at the single and cell aggregate level. Expert authors review the dominant mechanisms that manipulate and sort biological structures, making this a state-of-the-art overview of conventional cell sorting techniques, the principles of microfluidics, and of microfluidic devices. All chapters highlight the benefits and drawbacks of each technique they discuss, which include magnetic, electrical, optical, acoustic, gravity/sedimentation, inertial, deformability, and aqueous two-phase systems as the dominant mechanisms utilized by microfluidic devices to handle biological samples. Each chapter explains the physics of the mechanism at work, and reviews common geometries and devices to help readers decide the type of style of device required for various applications. This book is appropriate for graduate-level biomedical engineering and analytical chemistry students, as well as engineers and scientists working in the biotechnology industry.