ADVANCED BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING Edited by Gaetano D. Gargiulo and Alistair McEwan Advanced Biomedical Engineering Edited by Gaetano D. Gargiulo and Alistair McEwan Published by InTech Janeza Trdine 9, 51000 Rijeka, Croatia Copyright © 2011 InTech All chapters are Open Access articles distributed under the Creative Commons Non Commercial Share Alike Attribution 3.0 license, which permits to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt the work in any medium, so long as the original work is properly cited. After this work has been published by InTech, authors have the right to republish it, in whole or part, in any publication of which they are the author, and to make other personal use of the work. Any republication, referencing or personal use of the work must explicitly identify the original source. Statements and opinions expressed in the chapters are these of the individual contributors and not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the published articles. The publisher assumes no responsibility for any damage or injury to persons or property arising out of the use of any materials, instructions, methods or ideas contained in the book. Publishing Process Manager Romina Krebel Technical Editor Teodora Smiljanic Cover Designer Jan Hyrat Image Copyright Olivier Le Queinec, 2010. Used under license from Shutterstock.com First published August, 2011 Printed in Croatia A free online edition of this book is available at www.intechopen.com Additional hard copies can be obtained from orders@intechweb.org Advanced Biomedical Engineering, Edited by Gaetano D. Gargiulo and Alistair McEwan p. cm. ISBN 978-953-307-555-6 free online editions of InTech Books and Journals can be found at www.intechopen.com Contents Preface IX Part 1 Biomedical Signal Processing 1 Chapter 1 Spatial Unmasking of Speech Based on Near-Field Distance Cues 3 Craig Jin, Virginia Best, Gaven Lin and Simon Carlile Chapter 2 Pulse Wave Analysis 21 Zhaopeng Fan, Gong Zhang and Simon Liao Chapter 3 Multivariate Models and Algorithms for Learning Correlation Structures from Replicated Molecular Profiling Data 41 Lipi R. Acharya and Dongxiao Zhu Chapter 4 Biomedical Time Series Processing and Analysis Methods: The Case of Empirical Mode Decomposition 61 Alexandros Karagiannis, Philip Constantinou and Demosthenes Vouyioukas Chapter 5 Global Internet Protocol for Ubiquitous Healthcare Monitoring Applications 81 Dhananjay Singh Chapter 6 Recent Developments in Cell-Based Microscale Technologies and Their Potential Application in Personalised Medicine 93 Gregor Kijanka, Robert Burger, Ivan K. Dimov, Rima Padovani, Karen Lawler, Richard O'Kennedy and Jens Ducrée Part 2 Bio-Imaging 105 Chapter 7 Fine Biomedical Imaging Using X-Ray Phase-Sensitive Technique 107 Akio Yoneyama, Shigehito Yamada and Tohoru Takeda VI Contents Chapter 8 Diffusion of Methylene Blue in Phantoms of Agar Using Optical Absorption Techniques 129 Lidia Vilca-Quispe, Alejandro Castilla-Loeza, Juan José Alvarado-Gil and Patricia Quintana-Owen Chapter 9 Semiconductor II-VI Quantum Dots with Interface States and Their Biomedical Applications 143 Tetyana Torchynska and Yuri Vorobiev Chapter 10 Image Processing Methods for Automatic Cell Counting In Vivo or In Situ Using 3D Confocal Microscopy 183 Manuel G. Forero and Alicia Hidalgo Part 3 Biomedical Ethics and Legislation 205 Chapter 11 Cross Cultural Principles for Bioethics 207 Mette Ebbesen Chapter 12 Multi-Faceted Search and Navigation of Biological Databases 215 Mahoui M., Oklak M. and Perumal N. Chapter 13 Integrating the Electronic Health Record into Education: Models, Issues and Considerations for Training Biomedical Engineers 235 Elizabeth Borycki, Andre Kushniruk, Mu-Hsing Kuo and Brian Armstrong Chapter 14 Appropriateness and Adequacy of the Keywords Listed in Papers Published in Eating Disorders Journals Indexed Using the MEDLINE Database 247 Javier Sanz-Valero, Rocio Guardiola-Wanden-Berghe and Carmina Wanden-Berghe Chapter 15 Legislation, Standardization and Technological Solutions for Enhancing e-Accessibility in e-Health 261 Pilar Del Valle García, Ignacio Martínez Ruiz, Javier Escayola Calvo, Jesús Daniel Trigo Vilaseca and José García Moros Preface The field of biomedical engineering has expanded markedly in the past few years; finally it is possible to recognize biomedical engineering as a field on its own. Too often this important discipline of engineering was acknowledged as a minor engineering curriculum within the fields of material engineering (bio-materials) or electronic engineering (bio-instrumentations). However, given the fast advances in biological science, which have created new opportunities for development of diagnosis and therapy tools for human diseases, independent schools of biomedical engineering started to form to develop new tools for medical practitioners and carers. The discipline focuses not only on the development of new biomaterials, but also on analytical methodologies and their application to advance biomedical knowledge with the aim of improving the effectiveness and delivery of clinical medicine. The aim of this book is to present recent developments and trends in biomedical engineering, spanning across several disciplines and sub-specialization of the biomedical engineering such as biomedical technology, biomedical instrumentations, biomedical signal processing, bio-imaging and biomedical ethics and legislation. In the first section of this book, Biomedical Signal Processing, techniques of special unmasking for audio applications are reviewed together with multivariate models and algorithms for learning frameworks. In the second section of the book, Bio-imaging, novel techniques of cell counting and soft tissues x-rays are presented. Highlights of legislation and ethics applied to biomedical engineering are presented in the third and last section of the book, Biomedical Ethics and legislation. As Editors and also Authors in this field, we are honoured to be editing a book with such interesting and exciting content, written by a selected group of talented researchers. Gaetano D. Gargiulo Alistair McEwan “Federico II" The University of Naples, Naples, Italy The University of Sydney, NSW, Australia [...]... separated give rise to differences in binaural cues (interaural time and level differences, ITDs/ILDs) that can improve audibility by reducing energetic masking (Durlach and Colburn, 1978; 4 Advanced Biomedical Engineering Zurek, 1993) Perceived differences in location can also be used as a basis for perceptual streaming, and this has been shown to be a particularly important factor in the segregation... et al., 2009) Fig 1 shows a set of example DVF gain functions (to be applied to 1-m DTFs) as a function of frequency and distance for three azimuthal locations that were used in the study 6 Advanced Biomedical Engineering Fig 1 The DVF for three locations and two near-field distances The gain in dB is relative to the 1-m far-field case for each azimuth, and is shown for the left and right ears Shown... those used by Brungart and Simpson (2002) One target and one masker talker were simulated at -90° 1 Note that the ER-1 earphones reintroduce the ear-canal resonance that is removed by the DTF 8 Advanced Biomedical Engineering azimuth, directly to the left of the listener This region was expected to be particularly important in the study of near field perception due to the large ILDs that occur As illustrated... 3, bottom row) 2 The arcsine transformation converts binomially distributed data to an approximately normal distribution that is more suitable for statistical analysis (Studebaker, 1985) 10 Advanced Biomedical Engineering Fig 3 Mean performance data averaged across all 8 subjects (error bars show standard errors of the means) in Experiment 1 The left panel displays the raw (top) and normalized (middle)... target near The left column of Fig 4 shows results from the conditions in which the masker was fixed at 1 m and the target was moved into the near field for the low-pass filtered stimuli of 12 Advanced Biomedical Engineering Experiment 2 The raw data followed a similar trend to that observed in Experiment 1 (Fig 4, top left) As the target was moved closer to the listener, performance improved, with best... masker was moved in closer to the listener The bottom panels display the benefits of separation in distance, expressed as a difference in percentage points relative to the co-located case 14 Advanced Biomedical Engineering 4.3 Discussion The results from Experiment 2 in which the speech stimuli were low-pass filtered at 2 kHz were largely similar to those from Experiment 1 Performance across conditions... the better ear, the distinction between the different distances was reduced An advantage of the near field mixtures over the 1-m mixture was found only at low TMRs (Fig 6, middle right) 16 Advanced Biomedical Engineering Fig 6 Mean performance data averaged across all 8 subjects (error bars show standard errors of the means) in Experiment 3 The left panel displays the raw (top) and normalized (middle)... brings the sound perceptually closer to the head We anticipate further experiments conducted with hearing-impaired listeners to investigate the value of such a binaural hearing-aid algorithm 18 Advanced Biomedical Engineering 7 References Arbogast, T L., Mason, C R., and Kidd, G (2002) The effect of spatial separation on informational and energetic masking of speech Journal of the Acoustical Society of... environment Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol 110, pp 1119-1129 Studebaker, G A (1985) A rationalized arcsine transform Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, Vol 28, pp 455-462 20 Advanced Biomedical Engineering Zurek, P M (1993) Binaural advantages and directional effects in speech intelligibility, In Acoustical Factors Affecting Hearing Aid Performance, G A Studebaker and I Hochberg, pp... Mary invented a level based sphygmograph to measure the pulse rate It is the first device can actually record the pulse wave Frederick observed normal radial pressure wave and the carotid 22 Advanced Biomedical Engineering wave to find the normal waveform and the differences between those waveforms (Mahomed 1872) He figured out the special effect on the radial waveform caused by the high blood pressure . ADVANCED BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING Edited by Gaetano D. Gargiulo and Alistair McEwan Advanced Biomedical Engineering Edited by Gaetano. and sub-specialization of the biomedical engineering such as biomedical technology, biomedical instrumentations, biomedical signal processing, bio-imaging and biomedical ethics and legislation this important discipline of engineering was acknowledged as a minor engineering curriculum within the fields of material engineering (bio-materials) or electronic engineering (bio-instrumentations).