The purpose of this study is to develop an automatic algorithm for vessel segmentation in X-Ray angiogram using Random Forest (RF). The proposed algorithm is composed of the following steps: First, the multiscale hessian-based filtering is performed in order to enhance the vessel structure. Second, eigenvalues and eigenvectors of hessian matrix are used to learn the RF classifier as feature vectors. Finally, we can get the result through the trained RF. We evaluated the similarity between the result of proposed algorithm and the manual segmentation using 349 frames, and compared with the results of the following two methods: Frangi et al. and Krissian et al. According to the experimental results, the proposed algorithm showed high similarity compared to other two methods.

In order for medical devices to be used outside hospital, they have to be not only of small size but also power consumption has to be kept at low level. This study investigates the feasibility of application of ADS1298 ECG single-chip solution developed by Texas Instruments Inc. for use in development of a new platform for diagnostic resting ECG. To prove the feasibility of commercial products based on the ADS1298 chip, the performance of the ADS1298 chip was measured in terms of input impedance, common mode rejection, frequency response, and input dynamic range using the testing method under the suitability criteria of the IEC 60601-2-25 standard. Result of the this study shows that commercialization of the ECG products based on the ADS1298 ECG single-chip solution that satisfies the international standards would be possible, if the manufactures take the filter characteristics into account in building a new platform for diagnostic resting ECG.

Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disease which produces repeated seizures. Over 30% of epileptic patients cannot be treated with anti-epileptic drugs, and surgical resection may cause loss of brain functions. Seizure suppression by electrical stimulation is currently being investigated as a new treatment method as clinical evidence has shown that electrical stimulation to brain could suppress seizure activity. In this paper, design of a real-time closed-loop neurostimulation system for epileptic seizure suppression is presented. The system records neural signals, detects seizures and delivers electrical stimulation. The system consists of a 6-channel electrode, front-end amplifiers, a data acquisition board by National Instruments, and a neurostimulator and Generic Osorio-Frei algorithm was applied for seizure detection. The algorithm was verified through simulation using electroencephalogram data, and the operation of whole system was verified through simulation and in- vivo test.

Discrimination of Parkinson's disease (PD) from Essential tremor (ET) is often misdiagnosed in clinical practice. Since tremor is time-varying signal, and dominant and harmonic frequencies are shown in tremor only with moderate or severe symptom, there are some limitations to use frequency related features. Moreover, patients with PD or ET can suffer from both resting tremor and postural tremor. In this study, 28 patients with PD and 17 patients with ET were enrolled. Tremor was measured with accelerations on the more affected hand during resting and postural conditions. The ratio of root mean square (RMS) of resting tremor to RMS of postural tremor, the mean coefficients of autocorrelation function (ACF), and the mean of differences of two adjacent coefficients of ACF at resting and postural were calculated and compared between PD and ET. The performance showed 98% accuracy with support vector machine and leave-one-out cross validation. In addition, the method accurately differentiated the patients with tremor-dominant PD from patients with ET, with 100% accuracy. Therefore, the developed algorithm can assist clinicians in diagnosing and categorizing patients with tremor, especially, patients with mild symptom or the early stage of a disease, for proper treatment.

In this study, joint angles of the lower extremity and tibial acceleration and angular velocity were measured during a snowboard simulator exercises in order to evaluate the skill of snowboarders. Ten unskilled and ten expert snowboarders were recruited for the study. A three-dimensional motion capture system and two inertial sensor modules were used to acquire joint movements, acceleration and angular velocity of the lower extremities during snowboard simulator exercises. Pattern variations were calculated to assess variations in the snowboard simulator motion of unskilled and expert snowboarders. Results showed that expert snowboarders showed greater range of motion in joint angles and greater peak to peak amplitude in acceleration and angular velocity for tibia than unskilled snowboarders. The unskilled snowboarders did not show symmetrical shape(same magnitude but opposite direction) in tibial angular velocity during two edge turns in snowboard simulator exercises. The expert snowboarders showed smaller pattern variations for joint angle of lower extremity, tibial acceleration and tibial angular velocity than unskilled snowboarders. Inertial sensor data and pattern variations during the snowboard simulator exercises could be useful to evaluate the skill of snowboarders.

A standard air flow generator system was developed to generate air flows of various levels simultaneously applied to two different air flow transducer modules. Axes of two identical standard syringes for spirometer calibration were connected with each other and driven by a servo-motor. Linear displacement transducer was also connected to the syringe axis to accurately acquire the volume change signal. The user can select either sinusoidal or square waveform of volume change and manually input any volume as well as maximal flow rate levels ranging 0~3 l and 0~15 l/s, respectively. Various volume and flow levels were input to operate the system, then the volume signal was acquired followed by numerical differentiation to obtain the air flow signal. The measured volumes and maximal air flow rates were compared with the user input data. The relative errors between the user-input and the measured stroke volumes were all within 0.5%, demonstrating very accurate driving of the system. In case of the maximal flow rate, relatively large error was observed when the syringe was driven very fast within a very short time duration. However, except for these few data, most measured flow rates revealed relative errors of approximately 2%. When the measure and user-input stroke volume and maximal flow rate data were analyzed by linear regression analysis, respectively, the correlation coefficients were satisfactorily higher than 0.99 (p < 0.0001). These results demonstrate that the servo-motor controls the syringes with enough accuracy to generate standard air flows. Therefore, the present system would be very much practical for calibration process as well as performance evaluation and comparison of two different air flow transducer modules.

Recently, new gamma camera systems enabling low radiation dose imaging have been developed. We reviewed the recent development of these low dose gamma camera systems including high sensitivity detectors, device structures, noise reduction filters, efficient image reconstruction algorithms, low dose protocols, and so on. It is expected that further technological advances reduce both radiation dose and imaging time in gamma camera imaging especially for radiation-sensitive patients such as pediatric patients.

Recently, the structured data format in RDF/OWL has played an increasingly vital role in the semantic web. We converted pediatric and oncologic nuclear medicine imaging reports in free text into RDF/OWL format and evaluated the usefulness of nuclear medicine imaging reports in RDF/OWL by comparing SPARQL query results with the manually retrieved results by physicians from the reports in free text. SPARQL query showed 95% recall for simple queries and 91% recall for dedicated queries. In total, SPARQL query retrieved 93% (51 lesions of 55) recall and 100% precision for 20 clinical query items. All query results missed by SPARQL query were of some inference. Nuclear medicine imaging reports in the format of RDF/OWL were very useful for retrieving simple and dedicated query results using SPARQL query. Further study using more number of cases and knowledge for inference is warranted.

Outflow cannulation site of left ventricular assist device(LVAD) chosen by considering anatomical structure of thoracic cavity and vascular system. Though outflow cannulation site influences blood perfusion at each branch, there is no standard rule or quantitative data. In this study, we computed the amount of blood perfusion at each arterial branch numerically according to outflow cannulation sites(ascending aorta, aortic arch, descending aorta). We generated computational meshes to the three-dimensionally reconstructed arterial system. Clinically measured arterial pressure were used for inlet boundary condition, porous media were applied to mimic blood flow resistance. Blood perfusion through left common carotid artery was 2.5 times higher than other cases, and that through right common carotid artery was 1.1 times higher than other branches. Although this is simulation study, will be useful reference data for the clinical study of LVAD which considers blood perfusion efficiency.