This book provides a thorough overview of cutting-edge research on electronics applications relevant to industry, the environment, and society at large. It covers a broad spectrum of application domains, from automotive to space and from health to security, while devoting special attention to the use of embedded devices and sensors for imaging, communication and control. The book is based on the 2016 ApplePies Conference, held in Rome, Italy in September 2016, which brought together researchers and stakeholders to consider the most significant current trends in the field of applied electronics and to debate visions for the future. Areas addressed by the conference included information communication technology; biotechnology and biomedical imaging; space; secure, clean and efficient energy; the environment; and smart, green and integrated transport. As electronics technology continues to develop apace, constantly meeting previously unthinkable targets, further attention needs to be directed toward the electronics applications and the development of systems that facilitate human activities. This book, written by industrial and academic professionals, represents a valuable contribution in this endeavor.

This book presents the latest cutting edge research, theoretical methods, and novel applications in the field of computational intelligence and computational biological approaches that are aiming to combat COVID-19. The book gives the technological key drivers behind using AI to find drugs that target the virus, shedding light on the structure of COVID-19, detecting the outbreak and spread of new diseases, spotting signs of a COVID-19 infection in medical images, monitoring how the virus and lockdown is affecting mental health, and forecasting how COVID-19 cases and deaths will spread across cities and why. Further, the book helps readers understand computational intelligence techniques combating COVID-19 in a simple and systematic way.

The goal of this book is to provide, in a friendly and refreshing manner, both theoretical concepts and practical techniques for the important and exciting field of Artificial Intelligence that can be directly applied to real-world healthcare problems. Healthcare - the final frontier. Lately, it seems like Pandora opened the box and evil was released into the world. Fortunately, there was one thing left in the box: hope. In recent decades, hope has been increasingly represented by Intelligent Decision Support Systems. Their continuing mission: to explore strange new diseases, to seek out new treatments and drugs, and to intelligently manage healthcare resources and patients. Hence, this book is designed for all those who wish to learn how to explore, analyze and find new solutions for the most challenging domain of all time: healthcare.

This issue of "International Review of Neurobiology" brings together cutting-edge research on tissue engineering of the peripheral nerve. It reviews current knowledge and understanding, provides a starting point for researchers and practitioners entering the field, and builds a platform for further research and discovery.
This volume covers the cutting-edge research on tissue engineering of the peripheral nerve.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the fundamentals of nanotoxicity modeling and its implications for the development of novel nanomedicines. It lays out the fundamentals of nanotoxicity modeling for an array of nanomaterial systems, ranging from carbon-based nanoparticles to noble metals, metal oxides, and quantum dots. The author illustrates how molecular (classical mechanics) and atomic (quantum mechanics) modeling approaches can be applied to bolster our understanding of many important aspects of this critical nanotoxicity issue. Each chapter is organized by types of nanomaterials for practicality, making this an ideal book for senior undergraduate students, graduate students, and researchers in nanotechnology, chemistry, physics, molecular biology, and computer science. It is also of interest to academic and industry professionals who work on nanodrug delivery and related biomedical applications, and aids readers in their biocompatibility assessment efforts in the coming age of nanotechnology. This book also provides a critical assessment of advanced molecular modeling and other computational techniques to nanosafety, and highlights current and future biomedical applications of nanoparticles in relation to nanosafety.

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are expected to promote new applications for the ambulatory health monitoring of chronic patients and elderly population, aiming to improve their quality of life and independence. These networks are composed by wireless sensor nodes (WSNs) used for measuring physiological variables (e.g., glucose level in blood or body temperature) or controlling therapeutic devices (e.g., implanted insulin pumps). These nodes should exhibit a high degree of energy autonomy in order to extend their battery lifetime or even make the node supply to rely on harvesting techniques. Typically, the power budget of WSNs is dominated by the wireless link and, hence, many efforts have been directed during the last years toward the implementation of power efficient transceivers.

Because of the short range (typically no more than a few meters) and low data rate (typically in between 10 kb/s and 1 Mb/s), simple communication protocols can be employed. One of these protocols, specifically tailored for WBAN applications, is the Bluetooth low energy (BLE) standard.

This book describes the challenges and solutions for the design of ultra-low power transceivers for WBANs applications and presents the implementation details of a BLE transceiver prototype. Coverage includes not only the main concepts and architectures for achieving low power consumption, but also the details of the circuit design and its implementation in a standard CMOS technology."

This in-depth book addresses a key void in the literature surrounding the Internet of Things (IoT) and health. By systematically evaluating the benefits of mobile, wireless, and sensor-based IoT technologies when used in health and wellness contexts, the book sheds light on the next frontier for healthcare delivery. These technologies generate data with significant potential to enable superior care delivery, self-empowerment, and wellness management. Collecting valuable insights and recommendations in one accessible volume, chapter authors identify key areas in health and wellness where IoT can be used, highlighting the benefits, barriers, and facilitators of these technologies as well as suggesting areas for improvement in current policy and regulations. Four overarching themes provide a suitable setting to examine the critical insights presented in the 31 chapters: Mobile- and sensor-based solutions Opportunities to incorporate critical aspects of analytics to provide superior insights and thus support better decision-making Critical issues around aspects of IoT in healthcare contexts Applications of portals in healthcare contexts A comprehensive overview that introduces the critical issues regarding the role of IoT technologies for health, Delivering Superior Health and Wellness Management with IoT and Analytics paves the way for scholars, practitioners, students, and other stakeholders to understand how to substantially improve health and wellness management on a global scale.

With the dramatic evolution of shoulder arthroscopy techniques over the past five years, practitioners must search through numerous educational resources to learn about specific indications and definitive techniques. The field of orthopaedics lacks an all-encompassing text that is strictly and exclusively devoted to shoulder arthroscopy. Drs. James Tibone, Felix Savoie III, and Benjamin Shaffer have assembled the leading authorities in shoulder arthroscopy to provide the practitioner with invaluable information on the most cutting edge procedures to treat impingement problems, frozen shoulder, calcific tendonitis, and shoulder instability. This comprehensive, practical volume is enhanced with striking illustrations, detailing the surgical technique from positioning to closure. The chapter format gives introductory comments about disease/disorder, clinical presentation, surgical indications/patient selection, contraindications, surgical techniques, results, complications and pitfalls. There are also selected references and recommended readings at the end of each chapter. Shoulder Arthroscopy will be essential for all practicing orthopaedic surgeons, sports medicine and shoulder specialists who want to expand their expertise in this area.

This book describes a new family of bio-polymer gels made from cytoskeletal proteins - actin, microtubule, and tropomyosin. The importance of the gel state with multi-scale hierarchical structure is emphasized to utilize emergent functions in living organisms. Detailed protocol of gel preparation, specified method of structure investigation, and dynamic studies of self-organization, self-healing, synchronized oscillating, and autonomous motility functions are introduced together with biomimetic functions of synthetic hydrogels.

This authored monograph presents key aspects of signal processing analysis in the biomedical arena. Unlike wireless communication systems, biological entities produce signals with underlying nonlinear, chaotic nature that elude classification using the standard signal processing techniques, which have been developed over the past several decades for dealing primarily with standard communication systems. This book separates what is random from that which appears to be random and yet is truly deterministic with random appearance. At its core, this work gives the reader a perspective on biomedical signals and the means to classify and process such signals. In particular, a review of random processes along with means to assess the behavior of random signals is also provided. The book also includes a general discussion of biological signals in order to demonstrate the inefficacy of the well-known techniques to correctly extract meaningful information from such signals. Finally, a thorough discussion of recently proposed signal processing tools and methods for addressing biological signals is included. The target audience primarily comprises researchers and expert practitioners but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.

This innovative reference examines how consumer health informatics (CHI) can transform healthcare systems stressed by staffing shortages and budget constraints and challenged by patients taking a more active role in their care. It situates CHI as vital to upgrading healthcare service delivery, detailing the relationship between health information technologies and quality healthcare, and outlining what stakeholders need to learn for health IT systems to function effectively. Wide-ranging content identifies critical issues and answers key questions at the consumer, practitioner, administration, and staff levels, using examples from diverse conditions, countries, technologies, and specialties. In this framework, the benefits of CHI are seen across service domains, from individual patients and consumers to healthcare systems and global health entities. Included in the coverage: Use of video technology in an aged care environment A context-aware remote health monitoring service for improved patient care Accessibility issues in interoperable sharing of electronic health records: physician's perspective Managing gestational diabetes with mobile web-based reporting of glucose readings An organizing vision perspective for developing and adopting e-health solutions An ontology of consumer health informatics Contemporary Consumer Health Informatics combines blueprint and idea book for public health and health informatics students, healthcare professionals, physicians, medical administrators, managers, and IT practitioners.

Technological progress has allowed us to develop devices which make it possible to record blood pressure and heart rate outside the real living conditions. Furthermore, technological progress has provided computer tools to analyse data on a beat-to-beat basis, offering a large body of information on the complex patterns of blood pressure and heart rate variability in health and in disease which has clarified a number of mechanisms responsible for cardiovascular regulation during the day and night. This book aims at providing an updated state of the art on the analysis of blood pressure and heart rate variability from the different perspectives of physiologists, clinicians and engineers by gathering the contributions of experts taken from both the biomedical and the engineering environment. In particular, attention was focused on 1) the methodology of ambulatory blood pressure and heart rate analyses, 2) the mathematical models that can be derived from the data and the implications they have for the understating of normal and deranged cardiovascular control and 3) the present and future use of computer analysis of dynamically collected observations for the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases.

This book presents innovative research works to demonstrate the potential and the advancements of computing approaches to utilize healthcare centric and medical datasets in solving complex healthcare problems. Computing technique is one of the key technologies that are being currently used to perform medical diagnostics in the healthcare domain, thanks to the abundance of medical data being generated and collected. Nowadays, medical data is available in many different forms like MRI images, CT scan images, EHR data, test reports, histopathological data and doctor patient conversation data. This opens up huge opportunities for the application of computing techniques, to derive data-driven models that can be of very high utility, in terms of providing effective treatment to patients. Moreover, machine learning algorithms can uncover hidden patterns and relationships present in medical datasets, which are too complex to uncover, if a data-driven approach is not taken. With the help of computing systems, today, it is possible for researchers to predict an accurate medical diagnosis for new patients, using models built from previous patient data. Apart from automatic diagnostic tasks, computing techniques have also been applied in the process of drug discovery, by which a lot of time and money can be saved. Utilization of genomic data using various computing techniques is another emerging area, which may in fact be the key to fulfilling the dream of personalized medications. Medical prognostics is another area in which machine learning has shown great promise recently, where automatic prognostic models are being built that can predict the progress of the disease, as well as can suggest the potential treatment paths to get ahead of the disease progression.

Micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and nano-electro-mechanical systems (NEMS) are part of the hottest new wave of biomedical research and development today. This uniquely applications-focused book enables bio-device designers to reach new levels of success, with state-of-the-art coverage of everything from MEMS/NEMS design and fabrication to the most advanced breakthroughs in the bio-manipulation of cells and genes. Showcasing the work of leading international experts, this trail-blazing book explains the synthesis and use of metal nanoparticles in bio-sensing and drug delivery applications, including quantum dots. It explores in detail various micro and nano manipulation tools and techniques, including manipulators and endoscopes for microsurgery, in-vitro and in-vivo imaging diagnostics, and optical nano-surgery of subcellular components.

This book reports on the theoretical foundations, fundamental applications and latest advances in various aspects of connected services for health information systems. The twelve chapters highlight state-of-the-art approaches, methodologies and systems for the design, development, deployment and innovative use of multisensory systems and tools for health management in smart city ecosystems. They exploit technologies like deep learning, artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, cyber physical systems and sensor networks. Presenting the latest developments, identifying remaining challenges, and outlining future research directions for sensing, computing, communications and security aspects of connected health systems, the book will mainly appeal to academic and industrial researchers in the areas of health information systems, smart cities, and augmented reality.

During the last years computational methods lead to new approaches that can be applied within medical practice. Based on the tremendous advances in medical imaging and high-performance computing, virtual testing is able to help in medical decision processes or implant designs. Current challenges in medicine and engineering are related to the application of computational methods to clinical medicine and the study of biological systems at different scales. Additionally manufacturers will be able to use computational tools and methods to predict the performance of their medical devices in virtual patients. The physical and animal testing procedures could be reduced by virtual prototyping of medical devices. Here simulations can enhance the performance of alternate device designs for a range of virtual patients. This will lead to a refinement of designs and to safer products. This book summarizes different aspects of approaches to enhance function, production, initialization and complications of different types of implants and related topics.

Gain the medical insurance skills you need to succeed in today's outpatient and inpatient settings! Fordney's Medical Insurance and Billing, 16th Edition helps you master the insurance billing specialist's role and responsibilities in areas such as diagnostic coding, procedural coding, billing, and collection. Using clear, non-technical explanations, this book covers all of the types of insurance coverage commonly encountered in hospitals, physicians' offices, and clinics. Step-by-step guidelines lead you through medical documentation and administrative procedures. Written by coding specialist and educator Linda M. Smith, this market-leading text is a complete guide to becoming an efficient insurance billing specialist. Coverage of medical documentation, diagnostic coding, and procedural coding provides you with the foundation and skills needed to work in a physician's office as well as outpatient and inpatient settings. Coverage of the role and responsibilities of the insurance billing specialist emphasizes advanced job opportunities and certification. Step-by-step procedures detail common responsibilities of the insurance billing specialist and coder. Key terms and abbreviationsare defined and emphasized, reinforcing your understanding of new concepts and terminology. Color-coded icons denote and clarify information, rules, and regulations for each type of payer. Privacy, Security, and HIPAA chapter and Compliance Alerts throughout the book highlight important HIPAA compliance issues and regulations. NEW! Insights From The Field includes short interviews with insurance billing specialists who have experience in the field, providing a snapshot of their career paths and offering advice to the new student. NEW! Scenario boxes help you apply concepts to real-world situations. NEW! Quick Review sections summarize chapter content and also include review questions. NEW! Discussion Points provide the opportunity for students and instructors to participate in interesting and open dialogues related to the chapter's content. NEW! Expanded Health Care Facility Billing chapters are revised to provide the latest information impacting the insurance billing specialist working in a variety of healthcare facility settings. NEW! Insights From The Field includes short interviews with insurance billing specialists who have experience in the field, providing a snapshot of their career paths and offering advice to the new student. NEW! Scenario boxes help you apply concepts to real-world situations. NEW! Quick Review sections summarize chapter content and also include review questions. NEW! Discussion Points provide the opportunity for students and instructors to participate in interesting and open dialogues related to the chapter's content. NEW! Expanded Health Care Facility Billing chapters are revised to provide the latest information impacting the insurance billing specialist working in a variety of healthcare facility settings.

The book presents a knowledge discovery based approach to build a recommender system supporting a physician in treating tinnitus patients with the highly successful method called Tinnitus Retraining Therapy. It describes experiments on extracting novel knowledge from the historical dataset of patients treated by Dr. P. Jastreboff so that to better understand factors behind therapy's effectiveness and better personalize treatments for different profiles of patients. The book is a response for a growing demand of an advanced data analytics in the healthcare industry in order to provide better care with the data driven decision-making solutions. The potential economic benefits of applying computerized clinical decision support systems include not only improved efficiency in health care delivery (by reducing costs, improving quality of care and patient safety), but also enhancement in treatment's standardization, objectivity and availability in places of scarce expert's knowledge on this difficult to treat hearing disorder. Furthermore, described approach could be used in assessment of the clinical effectiveness of evidence-based intervention of various proposed treatments for tinnitus.

This book focuses on interdisciplinary research in the field of biomedical engineering and neuroscience. Biomedical engineering is a vast field, ranging from bioengineering to brain-computer interfaces. The book explores the system-level function and dysfunction of the nervous system from scientific and engineering perspectives. The initial sections introduce readers to the physiology of the brain, and to the biomedical tools needed for diagnostics and effective therapies for various neurodegenerative and regenerative disorders. In turn, the book summarizes the biomedical interventions that are used to understand the neural mechanisms underlying empathy disorders, and reviews recent advances in biomedical engineering for rehabilitation in connection with neurodevelopmental disorders and brain injuries. Lastly, the book discusses innovations in machine learning and artificial intelligence for computer-aided disease diagnosis and treatment, as well as applications of nanotechnology in therapeutic neurology.

This book examines the most novel and state-of-the-art applications of biomaterials, with chapters that exemplify approaches with targeted drug delivery, diabetes, neurodegenerative diseases and cranioplasty implants. Expert contributors analyze biomaterials such as calcium phosphate, sol-gel and quenched glasses, metallic and polymer implants, bioactive glass, and polymer composites while also covering important areas such as the soft tissue replacement, apatites, bone regeneration and cell encapsulation. This book is appropriate for biomedical engineers, materials scientists, and clinicians who are seeking to implement the most advanced approaches and technologies with their patients.

The rapid development of new technologies has created a lasting impact in the healthcare sector during the past decades. Due to this influence, potential clinical problems have decreased while the quality of healthcare delivery and overall user friendliness has increased and contributed to cost-effective healthcare systems. Biomedical and Clinical Engineering for Healthcare Advancement is an essential reference source that discusses growth in healthcare applications driven by the adoption of new technologies, as well as the expansion of machine learning algorithms for clinical decision making. It focuses on combining vision, motion, data acquisition, and automated control to accelerate the development of affordable and portable medical devices. Featuring research on topics such as artificial intelligence, drug delivery, and retinal imaging, this book is ideally designed for healthcare professionals, biomedical engineers, biomedical professionals, clinicians, hospital directors, physicians, medical students, and clinical researchers.

Systems-level neuronal mechanisms that coordinate the temporally, anatomically, and functionally distributed neuronal activity into coherent cognitive operations in the human brain have remained poorly understood. In humans, neuronal oscillations and synchronization can be recorded non-invasively with electro- and magnetoencephalography (EEG and MEG) that have excellent temporal resolution and an adequate spatial resolution when combined with source-reconstruction methods. In this book, leading authors in the field describe how recent methodological advances have paved the way to several major breakthroughs in the observations of large-scale synchrony from human non-invasive MEG data. This volume also presents the caveats influencing analyses of synchronization. These include the non-homogeneous sensitivity of MEG to superficial cortical sources, and, most importantly, the multitude of consequences of linear mixing. Linear mixing is an immense confounder in the sensor-level analyses of synchronization, but is also present at the source level. Approaches that can be used to avoid or compensate for these issues are then discussed. Thereafter, several authors take up a number of the functional roles that large-scale synchronization has in cognition. The authors assess how the spatio-temporal and -spectral organization and strength of both local and large-scale synchronized networks are associated with conscious sensory perception, visual working memory functions, and attention. These chapters summarize several lines of research showing how the strength of local and inter-areal oscillations in both cortical and subcortical brain structures is correlated with cognitive functions. Together these data suggest that synchronized neuronal oscillations may be a systems-level neuronal mechanism underlying the coordination of distributed processing in human cognition. In line with this argument, other authors go on to describe how oscillations and synchronization are altered in clinical populations, complementing the data presented on healthy subjects. Importantly, this book includes chapters from authors using many different approaches to the analyses of neuronal oscillations, ranging from local oscillatory activities to the usage of graph theoretical tools in the analyses of synchronization. In this way the present volume provides a comprehensive view on the analyses and functional significance of neuronal oscillations in humans. This book is aimed at doctoral and post-doctoral students as well as research scientists in the fields of cognitive neuroscience, psychology, medicine, and neurosciences.