This volume of the series Cardiac and Vascular Biology presents the most relevant aspects of vascular mechanobiology along with many more facets of this fascinating, timely and clinically highly relevant field. Mechanotransduction, mechanosensing, fluid shear stress, hameodynamics and cell fate, are just a few topics to name. All important aspects of vascular mechanobiology in health and disease are reviewed by some of the top experts in the field. This volume, together with a second title on cardiac mechanobiology featured in this series, will be of high relevance to scientists and clinical researchers in the area of vascular biology, cardiology and biomedical engineering.

This volume contains the papers of the 7th International Workshop on Medical and Service Robots (MESROB) which was held in Basel, Switzerland, on June 7-9, 2021. The main topics include: design of medical devices, kinematics and dynamics for medical robotics, exoskeletons and prostheses, anthropomorphic hands, therapeutic robots and rehabilitation, cognitive robots, humanoid and service robots, assistive robots and elderly assistance, surgical robots, human-robot interfaces, haptic devices, medical treatments, medical lasers, and surgical planning and navigation. The contributions, which were selected by means of a rigorous international peer-review process, highlight numerous exciting ideas that will spur novel research directions and foster multidisciplinary collaboration among different specialists, demonstrating that medical and service robotics will drive the technological and societal change in the coming decades.

Octacalcium Phosphate Biomaterials: Past, Present and Future is a comprehensive study of octacalcium phosphate (OCP), a next generation biomaterial for bone regeneration. By focusing both on fundamental research and the use of OCP as a scaffold material, this book explores its potential to deliver improved clinical results. Early chapters in the book discuss OCP's effects on bone cell activity, cellular interactions and their role in bone formation, repair and replacement. Later chapters cover topics such as drug delivery, synthesis methodologies and future analysis techniques. This will be an invaluable and unique resource for researchers, clinicians, students and industrialists in the area of orthopedics and dentistry. OCP is known to be a pre-cursor to hydroxyapatite in the human biomineralization process that forms bone and tooth enamel. Research studies that have emerged in recent years suggest OCP's tremendous potential as a bioactive material.

This book describes the current state of knowledge in the field of multi-scale ECM mechanics and mechanobiology with a focus on experimental and modelling studies in biomechanical characterization, advanced optical microscopy and imaging, as well as computational modeling. This book also discusses the scale dependency of ECM mechanics, translation of mechanical forces from tissue to cellular level, and advances and challenges in improving our understanding of cellular mechanotransduction in the context of living tissues and organisms.

Dendrimers are repeatedly branched and roughly spherical large molecules. They can be used in various medical applications, such as anticancer polymeric nanomedicines and nanocarriers, gene carriers and vectors in gene delivery, contrast agents for molecular imaging and vaccines against infectious diseases and cancer. The highly branched, multivalent nature and molecular architecture of dendrimers make them ideal tools for a variety of tissue engineering applications. This book describes different categories of dendrimers, their biomedical and physico-chemical applications as well as convergent and divergent syntheses, click chemistry and ligation strategies. It is a rich source of information for researchers in biochemistry and pharmacology working on drug development as well as for organic chemists who are engaged in synthesis of dendrimers.

This book is the second of two volumes that offer a comprehensive, up-to-date account of current knowledge regarding high-density lipoprotein (HDL), the changes that occur in HDL under different conditions, the clinical applications of HDL, and means of enhancing HDL functionality. In this volume, the focus is on the improvement of HDL, enhancement of its functionality, and the use of HDL for therapeutic purposes. In the first section, up-to-date information is provided on such topics as the tumor regression-promoting and antidiabetic activities of reconstituted HDL containing V156K apolipoprotein A-I, the enhancement of HDL effects by high doses of vitamin C, the benefits derived from incorporation of growth hormones 1 and 2 into rHDL, and the biological functions of omega-3 linolenic acid in rHDL. The enhancement of HDL functionality by policosanol and the resultant benefits are thoroughly examined in a separate section. Readers will also find the latest information on clinical applications of HDL. Here, specific topics include the enhancement of adenoviral gene delivery and the delivery of rapamycin. In documenting the latest knowledge in this field, this volume will be of interest to both researchers and clinicians.

This book gathers selected studies on the industrial applications of glycoside hydrolases (GHs), presenting an updated classification of these enzymes, and discussing their structure, mechanisms, and various approaches to improve their catalytic efficiency. Further, it explains the various industrial applications of glycoside hydrolases in food, effluent treatment, biofuel production, and the paper and pulp industries. Lastly, the book provides a comparative analysis of glycoside hydrolases and discusses the role of metagenomics in the discovery of industrially important enzymes. As such it is a thought-provoking, instructive and informative resource for biochemists, enzymologists, molecular biologists and bioprocess technologists.

This book introduces key fundamentals of microarray bioprinting, including the required chip platforms and associated instruments/devices, experimental protocols for cell printing and biochemical- and cell-based assays, and several example applications. Various bioprinting approaches that allow for the rapid testing of hundreds of different cell culture conditions in combinations on a single chip are discussed in detail. Also covered is high-content, 3D cell-based imaging assays of tissue functions on miniaturized tissue constructs for high-throughput, predictive screening of drug efficacy and toxicity. This is an ideal book for graduate and postgraduate students in the field of biomedical engineering as well as scientists in the pharmaceutical industry. This book also: Broadens readers' understanding of the principles of microarray bioprinting, chip platforms and associated instruments/devices, and surface chemistry for micropatterning of cells on the chip platform Covers the latest developments in printing cells in hydrogels and methods of gelation as well as printing other biological samples in aqueous solutions Illustrates the complete process for cell staining and high-content imaging of 3D cells on the chip and predicting human metabolism and toxicology on the chip

Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) Repair Strategies provides researchers the latest information on potential regenerative approaches to spinal cord injury, specifically focusing on therapeutic approaches that target regeneration, including cell therapies, controlled drug delivery systems, and biomaterials. Dr. Giuseppe Perale and Dr. Filippo Rossi lead a team of authoritative authors in academia and industry in this innovative reference on the field of regenerative medicine and tissue engineering. This book presents all the information readers need to understand the current and potential array of techniques, materials, applications and their benefits for spinal cord repair.

Computational biology drives discovery through its use of high-throughput informatics approaches. This book provides a road map of the current drug development process and how computational biology approaches play a critical role across the entire drug discovery pipeline. Through the use of previously unpublished, real-life case studies the impact of a range of computational approaches are discussed at various phases of the pipeline. Additionally, a focus section provides innovative visualisation approaches, from both the drug discovery process as well as from other fields that utilise large datasets, recognising the increasing use of such technology. Serving the needs of early career and more experienced scientists, this up-to-date reference provides an essential introduction to the process and background of drug discovery, highlighting how computational researchers can contribute to that pipeline.

This book describes the range of technologies that have been developed for diagnosing and assessing Parkinson's disease patients. Also presenting the latest studies providing insights into the changes to the neural system in Parkinson's disease, it is a valuable resource for neurologists, general practitioners and nurses. Further, the book highlights areas that require more research, and as such will appeal to researchers, biomedical engineers and clinicians.

Biomechanics of Coronary Atherosclerotic Plaque: From Model to Patient, First Edition, is the first comprehensive text to focus on important biomechanical studies conducted in the last decade that have increased our understanding of coronary atherosclerotic plaque initiation, growth, and rupture, as well as improving the design of medical devices and clinical interventions, including surgical procedures. The book provides students, researchers, engineers, clinicians, and interventional cardiologists with an overview of the main topics related to the biomechanics of atherosclerosis, in a single volume written by several experts in the field. This volume is part of the Biomechanics of Living Organs book series. The biomechanics of human soft tissues and organs has been an emerging research field since the publication of Y.C. Fung's original book series in the 1990s. The publication of such books entirely dedicated to a specific biomechanical subject is necessary to advance scientific research in the field of biomechanics and to transfer important knowledge to future generations. Therefore, this series of volumes on the biomechanics of living organs has been created. This series began in July 2017 with the publication of a first volume on the fundamentals of Hyperelastic Constitutive Laws for Finite Element Modeling of Living Organs. The current volume on the Biomechanics of Coronary Atherosclerotic Plaque, is the latest in this new series.

This book presents an overview of up-converting phosphor (UCP), including UCP preparation, development of the rapid detection strips and UCP industrialization. It also discusses the wide clinical applications of this technology, such as in food poisoning, infectious diseases, drug-abuse and disaster rescue, where rapid point-of-care testing is often critical. Conventional testing methods are mainly based on gold immunochromatography, which relies heavily on results being read with the naked eye. However, up-converting phosphor technology (UPT) employs UCP particles as labels for rapid target detection. Unlike other conventional fluorescence techniques, UCP is excited by infrared light and emitted visible light. This anti-stokes phenomenon provides this special label with significant advantages, including zero background detection, high resistance to environmental influences (e.g. pH, salts, sample contamination), high sensitivity and quantitative detection. Systematically summarizing UCP technology and its wide applications, this book is a valuable resource for researchers and technicians in the field.

Advanced 3D-Printed Systems and Nanosystems for Drug Delivery and Tissue Engineering explores the intricacies of nanostructures and 3D printed systems in terms of their design as drug delivery or tissue engineering devices, their further evaluations and diverse applications. The book highlights the most recent advances in both nanosystems and 3D-printed systems for both drug delivery and tissue engineering applications. It discusses the convergence of biofabrication with nanotechnology, constructing a directional customizable biomaterial arrangement for promoting tissue regeneration, combined with the potential for controlled bioactive delivery. These discussions provide a new viewpoint for both biomaterials scientists and pharmaceutical scientists.

The thesis focuses on the control of blood glucose devices and design of implantable devices, and offers valuable insights on diabetes mellitus and related physiology and treatments. Diabetes mellitus is a widespread chronic disease in the modern world that affects millions of people around the globe. In Singapore, one in ten of the population has diabetes, and the severity of the problem has prompted the country's prime minister to talk about the disease at the National Day Rally in 2017. Designing an artificial pancreas that can provide effective blood glucose control for individuals with diabetes is one of the most challenging engineering problems. The author reports on research into the development of an implantable artificial pancreas that can regulate blood glucose levels by delivering appropriate dosages of insulin when necessary. By sensing blood glucose and injecting insulin directly into the vein, the implantable device aims to remove delays that occur with subcutaneous blood glucose sensing and insulin delivery. Preliminary in-vitro and in-vivo experimental results suggest that the implantable device for blood glucose control could be a clinically viable alternative to pancreas transplant.

Biointegration of Medical Implant Materials, Second Edition, provides a unique and comprehensive review of recent techniques and research into material and tissue interaction and integration. New sections discuss soft tissue integration, with chapters on the biocompatibility of engineered stem cells, corneal tissue engineering, and vascular grafts. Other sections review tissue regeneration, inorganic nanoparticles for targeted drug delivery, alginate based drug delivery devices, and design considerations, with coverage of the biocompatibility of materials and their relevance to drug delivery and tissue engineering. With its distinguished editor and team of international contributors, this book is ideal for medical materials scientists and engineers in industry and academia.

Compressive Sensing in Healthcare, part of the Advances in Ubiquitous Sensing Applications for Healthcare series gives a review on compressive sensing techniques in a practical way, also presenting deterministic compressive sensing techniques that can be used in the field. The focus of the book is on healthcare applications for this technology. It is intended for both the creators of this technology and the end users of these products. The content includes the use of EEG and ECG, plus hardware and software requirements for building projects. Body area networks and body sensor networks are explored.

This book gathers papers presented at the 2019 Movement, Health & Exercise (MoHE) Conference and International Sports Science Conference (ISSC). The theme of this year's conference was "Enhancing Health and Sports Performance by Design". The content covers (but is not limited to) the following topics: exercise science; human performance; physical activity & health; sports medicine; sports nutrition; management & sports studies; and sports engineering & technology.

Systems Simulation and Modelling for Cloud Computing and Big Data Applications provides readers with the most current approaches to solving problems through the use of models and simulations, presenting SSM based approaches to performance testing and benchmarking that offer significant advantages. For example, multiple big data and cloud application developers and researchers can perform tests in a controllable and repeatable manner. Inspired by the need to analyze the performance of different big data processing and cloud frameworks, researchers have introduced several benchmarks, including BigDataBench, BigBench, HiBench, PigMix, CloudSuite and GridMix, which are all covered in this book. Despite the substantial progress, the research community still needs a holistic, comprehensive big data SSM to use in almost every scientific and engineering discipline involving multidisciplinary research. SSM develops frameworks that are applicable across disciplines to develop benchmarking tools that are useful in solutions development.

A Beginners Guide to Data Agglomeration and Intelligent Sensing provides an overview of the Sensor Cloud Platform, Converge-casting, and Data Aggregation in support of intelligent sensing and relaying of information. The book begins with a brief introduction on sensors and transducers, giving readers insight into the various types of sensors and how one can work with them. In addition, it gives several real-life examples to help readers properly understand concepts. An overview of concepts such as wireless sensor networks, cloud platforms, and device-to-cloud and sensor cloud architecture are explained briefly, as is data gathering in wireless sensor networks and aggregation procedures. Final sections explore how to process gathered data and relay the data in an intelligent way, including concepts such as supervised and unsupervised learning, software defined networks, sensor data mining and smart systems.

Real-Time Data Analytics for Large-Scale Sensor Data covers the theory and applications of hardware platforms and architectures, the development of software methods, techniques and tools, applications, governance and adoption strategies for the use of massive sensor data in real-time data analytics. It presents the leading-edge research in the field and identifies future challenges in this fledging research area. The book captures the essence of real-time IoT based solutions that require a multidisciplinary approach for catering to on-the-fly processing, including methods for high performance stream processing, adaptively streaming adjustment, uncertainty handling, latency handling, and more.

The only book that covers in detail a broad range of cutting-edge topics within motor rehabilitation technology

Neural engineering is a discipline that uses engineering techniques to understand, repair, replace, enhance, or treat diseases of neural systems. This book describes state-of-the-art methods within this field, from brain-computer interfaces to spinal and cortical plasticity. Touching on electrode design, signal processing, the neurophysiology of movement, robotics, and much more, this innovative book presents the latest information for readers working in biomedical engineering.

Each section of "Introduction to Neural Engineering for Motor Rehabilitation "begins with an overview of techniques before moving on to provide information on the most recent findings. Topics include: INJURIES OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM--including diseases and injuries of the central nervous system leading to sensory-motor impairment; peripheral and spinal plasticity after nerve injuries; and motor control modules of human movement in health and diseaseSIGNAL DETECTION AND CONDITIONING--including progress in peripheral neural interfaces; multi-modal, multi-site neuronal recordings for brain research; methods for non-invasive electroencephalograph detection; wavelet denoising and conditioning of neural recordingsFUNCTION REPLACEMENT (Prostheses and Orthosis)--including an introduction to upper limb prosthetics; controlling prostheses using peripheral nerve stimulation invasive interfaces for amputees; and exoskeletal robotics for functional substitutionFUNCTION RESTORATION--including methods for movement restoration; advanced user interfaces for upper limb functional electrical stimulation; and selectivity of peripheral neural interfacesREHABILITATION THROUGH NEUROMODULATION--including brain-computer interface applied to motor recovery after brain injury; functional electrical therapy of upper extremities; and robotic assisted neurorehabilitation

"Introduction to Neural Engineering for Motor Rehabilitation" is an important textbook and reference for graduate students and researchers in the fields of biomedical and neural engineering.

Biopolymer-Based Formulations: Biomedical and Food Applications presents the latest advances in the synthesis and characterization of advanced biopolymeric formulations and their state-of-the-art applications across biomedicine and food science. Sections cover the fundamentals, applications, future trends, environmental, ethical and medical considerations, and biopolymeric architectures that are organized in nano, micro and macro scales. The final section of the book focuses on novel applications and recent developments. This book is an essential resource for researchers, scientists and advanced students in biopolymer science, polymer science, polymer chemistry, polymer composites, plastics engineering, biomaterials, materials science, biomedical engineering, and more. It will also be of interest to R&D professionals, scientists and engineers across the plastics, food, biomedical and pharmaceutical industries.

Medical Data Sharing, Harmonization and Analytics serves as the basis for understanding the rapidly evolving field of medical data harmonization combined with the latest cloud infrastructures for storing the harmonized (shared) data. Chapters cover the latest research and applications on data sharing and protection in the medical domain, cohort integration through the recent advancements in data harmonization, cloud computing for storing and securing the patient data, and data analytics for effectively processing the harmonized data.

Drug Delivery Aspects reviews additional features of drug delivery systems, along with the standard formulation development, like preclinical testing, conversion into solid dosage forms, roles of excipients and polymers used on stability and sterile processing. There is a focus on formulation engineering and related large scale (GMP) manufacturing, regulatory, and functional aspects of drug delivery systems. A detailed discussion on biologics and vaccines gives insights to readers on new developments in this direction. The series Expectations and Realities of Multifunctional Drug Delivery Systems examines the fabrication, optimization, biological aspects, regulatory and clinical success of wide range of drug delivery carriers. This series reviews multifunctionality and applications of drug delivery systems, industrial trends, regulatory challenges and in vivo success stories. Throughout the volumes discussions on diverse aspects of drug delivery carriers, such as clinical, engineering, and regulatory, facilitate insight sharing across expertise area and form a link for collaborations between industry-academic scientists and clinical researchers. Expectations and Realities of Multifunctional Drug Delivery Systems connects formulation scientists, regulatory experts, engineers, clinical experts and regulatory stake holders. The wide scope of the book ensures it as a valuable reference resource for researchers in both academia and the pharmaceutical industry who want to learn more about drug delivery systems.