فصلنامه مهندسی پزشکی زیستی
سال ششم شماره 4 (زمستان 1391)

Collagen and Hydroxyapatite (HA) nanoparticles are significant constituent of the natural bone. In this study, the effect of collagen on the morphological and phase characteristics of calcium phosphate nanoparticles was investigated. The synthesis reaction was initiated by mixing H3PO4 as phosphorous source and CaCl2 as calcium source in presence of Collagen Type 1. Collagen concentration in suspension and Ca to P ratio was 1% and 1.67 respectively. The morphology and structure of samples (with collagen and without collagen), heat treated at 600 0C were characterized by X-Ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transformation infrared (FTIR) and Scanning electron microscopy (SEM). More fine and flake-like shape particles were observed in the SEM images of sample synthesized in the presence of collagen compared to the control sample which was constituted of larger granular particles. The XRD results revealed the powders were composed of hydroxyapatite and octacalcium phosphate and the sample synthesized in the presence of collagen was less crystalline. The amide bands of collagen and P-O and OH characteristic peaks were identified in FT-IR spectra.

In present work, recognition of isolated word has been studied. The purpose of this research is to increase the performance of children’s speech recognizer using Vocal Tract Length Normalization. This recognition system has been created to design a speech therapy software. Recognition of correct and wrong pronunciation and help children to improve it using some feedbacks are the goals of this software. In test phase, some speech data that are related to correct and incorrect pronunciation of 47 words have been utilized. Four Baseline models have been Trained, one for children, one combined model (females and children) and two for Adults (by exploiting one Persian database). Children’s model was trained and tested with data that have been collected from 38 children (5 to 8 years old). These experiments were implemented in HTK toolkit. Poor performance was improved using VTLN. Improvement of adult’s model was more than children’s model.

One of the main causes of early osteoarthritis of the hip is Femoroacetabular Impingement (FAI). When the femoral head loses its spherical shape at head-neck junction, a special type of impingement, called Cam impingement, occurs. Alpha angle can be used as a geometric parameter for evaluating this kind of anatomic deformity. In this article we propose a fully automatic strategy for estimating alpha angle by analyzing 3D data. In the proposed strategy a radial plane around the femoral head-neck axis is rotated in order to provide alpha angles in different orientations. For evaluating the proposed method, the alpha angle of twelve 3D femur models of female subjects, reconstructed from magnetic resonance images (including both right and left femur), have been estimated. The mean and standard deviation of these estimated alpha angles have been found to be in good agreement with the expected values for alpha angle in healthy human. In addition, the effect of the data resolution on the provided results has been evaluated in terms of accuracy and speed, by using four different resolutions of 3D meshes. The results indicate that using 64 times lower data resolution can increase the computational speed up to about 8 times and add an average error of about 2° to the estimated alpha angles.

Recent research in pervasive computing field leads to use of novel techniques for human activity recognition. One of these techniques is electrooculography which helps to record eye movements and by analyzing these movements’ patterns it’s possible to recognize daily life activities like reading. Eye movement patterns during reading can be detected using only EOG signals from horizontal channel instead of both horizontal and vertical channels, so only horizontal channel electrode placement on subject’s face set up for hindrance reduction is used in this work. Despite of channels reduction and by using DTW-based string matching algorithm and reading reference template extraction using wavelet transform and encoding of EOG signal, the performance of classification between reading and non-reading data increased, As it shows 4% increase in maximum recognition rate and also low standard deviation in recognition rate in addition to 7% increase in mean of recall which demonstrate that the algorithm is more robust and reliable in comparison with previous algorithms encountering various situations and subjects.

This paper addresses a new control scheme for bilateral telesurgical system with flexible links surgical robot. In this regard, hybrid structure of feedback and feedforward controller is suggested for flexible slave robot. This approach utilizes capability of Input Shaping (IS) as feedforward controller to reduce vibration at robot’s end tip and the feedback controller based on collocated Proportional-Derivative (PD) for control rigid body motion of the system. Stability of closed loop input shaper for nonlinear systems is discussed for the first time in this article. The stability conditions for overall system with constant communication time delay are derived using lyapunov method. Due to the independence of the system parameters, combination of these controllers results stability robustness to parameter uncertainties. Moreover, It is shown that reshaped master command to slave’s controller improves tracking performance in the presence of robot flexibility. Simulation results are used to verify the main theoretical points of this paper and demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed control framework in terms of input tracking and vibration suppression.

In vitro fertilization (IVF) is a solution to overcome the problem of infertility of couples .Lately with the development of technology and using robotic systems, telesurgery systems are used in order to increase the accuracy, better control of needle movement and preventing injury to the ovum cell while injection in IVF. To provide better control of injection, haptic systems are used. In this study, a haptic system is designed with virtual reality environment in order to perform In vitro fertilization. For modeling of injection force, point-load model is utilized. A mass-spring model is used to simulate cell deformation during insertion. Simulation results have a good conformity with related researches.

The photoplethysmogram (PPG) is a low cost and ubiquitous signal and has always had a great significance in cardiovascular parameter identification such as arterial dilation due to a stimulus. The PPG is generally recorded from the fingertip which is affected by the auto-regulation mechanism (ARM), preventing the results to be well correlated with standard methods based on imaging the brachial or radial artery.  Based on the fact that the ARM has no effect on conduit arteries, the correlation between fingertip and radial artery PPG is investigated in this work. A custom made probe is fabricated using an array of photodiodes and a 960 nm LED for recording the wrist photoplethysmogram (PPG). The design is based on Monte-Carlo simulation of light propagation in tissues. Two series of experiments were carried-out: normal breathing and deep breathing. In both experiments, index finger and wrist PPG were simultaneously recorded. In the first series of experiments, signals from 9 subjects were recorded and the correlation coefficient for the raw signals (AC+DC), the AC and DC components of wrist and finger PPG were 62.5% ± 12.1%, 91.2% ± 6.9% and 61% ± 13.4% respectively. In the second series of experiment (deep breathing), signals from 6 subjects were recorded and the correlation coefficient for the raw signals (AC+DC), the AC and DC components were 89.7% ± 5.9%, 93.7% ± 3.3% and 89.9% ± 5.9% respectively. These results show that under normal breathing conditions, only the AC components of the PPG signals are highly correlated. When respiration becomes the dominant effect, both AC and DC parts become highly correlated.