Biomedical Engineering: Applications, Basis and Communications

Automated preparation of DNA from plants is difficult because of the rigid leaf structure and the high amount of nucleolytic activities in vacuoles. We established a protocol for DNA preparation from dried leaf samples of maize, tobacco, and periwinkle using the MagNA Pure LC system. The isolated templates can be used for PCR analysis with the Light Cycler instrument.

Fractals can model many classes of time-series data. The fractal dimension is an important characteristic of fractals that contains information about their geometrical structure at multiple scales. The covering methods are a class of efficient approaches, e.g., box-counting (BC) method, to estimate the fractal dimension. In this paper, the differential box-counting (DBC) approach, originally for 2-D applications, is modified and applied to 1-D case. In addition, two algorithms, called 1-D shifting-DBC (SDBC-1D) and 1-D scanning-BC (SBC-1D), are also proposed for 1-D signal analysis. The fractal dimensions for 1-D biomedical pulse and ECG signals are calculated.

This paper presents an SMS based design in the GSM system for a portable, light weighted, and small sized TeleAlarm device. The device is composed of a transmitter and a controller. When an emergent situation such as a stroke or a fall occurs, the user only needs to push a button to trigger the controller. The controller automatically sends text messages stored in its database through the transmitter to specified mobile phone numbers for help. The SMS uses only the control channels in the GSM system to transfer the message, which enables the receiving-end user to receive it even during a call. An experimental test shows that a complete message transmission only needs 2.949 seconds in average. The design is convenient to elderly people who may live alone.

Tissue can be looked upon as a cell composite, where cell expresses its functions, while extra cellular matrixes (ECMs) secreted provide cell information and do its matrix functions. Here ECMs are, physical and chemical networks consisted of proteins (e.g. collagen, fibronectin, laminin and vitronectin etc.) and glycosaminoglycans (GAGs, e.g. hyaluronic acid, chodroitin 4-sulfate, chodroitin 6-sulfate etc.). The idea cell-carrier should be the one, which most mimics the ECM. Therefore, chitosan in which the N-acetylglucosamine moiety is a structural feature also found in the GAGs, and gelatin, the partially denatured derivative of collagen were used to develop hiomaterials. They will exhibit related bioactivities, as their analogue and precursor, respectively.

Chitosan gelatin network based biomaterials can be applied as membrane, scaffold, surface modifier and non-viral vectorfor. DNA delivery in tissue engineering. Some of our activities were reported. These biomaterials have promising perspectives.

The objective of this paper is to present a dynamic analysis of the human knee for various activities such as walking and stair ascending/descending. The results of this work is significant as it can used as inputs to joint simulators for artificial joint study, for rehabilitation purposes and to some extend applied to sports biomechanics. In the present work an experimental study consisting of a motion sensor and a force plate was used to capture the motion of subjects and to provide ground force reactions data that will serve as inputs to the model. Subjects in the 50-65 years old bracket performed activities such as walking, stairs ascending and descending. This age bracket was chosen because most of patients with knee-related problems are found in this age group. Some of the results from the present work correlated with that of published literature. However, the present analysis was based on a more comprehensive model of the knee, which makes the results more realistic to the actual mechanical behavior of the lower limb.

Silicone fluid is applied to reduce the friction of medical device in this study. Several factors, which might affect the friction of Arterial-Venous Fistula (A. V.F.) Needles, were investigated by a series of experiments. The experimental results showed that a better condition for the coating is using 10/90-weight ratio of MDX4/n-hexane silicone solution and dipping for 1.5 seconds. Two-step coating with an interval of 20 minutes also was examined to give an improvement in the lubricity of needles. It was observed that increased DC 360 concentration in coating solution displays more excellent friction reduction properties. Experimental consequences also showed that the lubricity of needles coated with DC 360 (350cst) is superior to that of coated with DC 360 (12,500cst).

An Expert Vision motion analysis system with five analog video cameras was used to evaluate the mouth movement during two facial animations (smile and puffy face). Sixteen skin markers were adhered to the face of subject according to the anatomic landmarks to represent the functional movement of the facial muscles. The trajectory of the four or eight peri-oral skin markers was simultaneously evaluated by Challis technique, instead of individual movement of single marker. The 4-marker method is a little less accurate than 8-marker method. But the 4-marker method can be incorporated as a part of our modality of facial motion analysis, including two/three dimensional displacement of individual marker and absolute/relative displacement of paired markers. It was much easy for data acqusition and no extra marker was needed in the whole modality of our facial motion analysis. Physicians can use this Challis technique to evaluate grouped movement of facial markers, as a whole, in different animation.