Bio-Medical Materials and Engineering - Volume 24, issue 6

Authors: Gao, Zhen-hai | Fan, Da | Wang, Deping | Zhao, Hui | Zhao, Kaishu | Chen, Chaoyang

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: In this study a musculoskeletal model of driver steering maneuver was established. The model was driven by the steering angle and steering torque when performing typical steering test. The simulation was calculated using inverse dynamics. Maximum muscle activity and the muscle activity of each muscle were studied afterwards. The key muscles that generated steering torque were scapular portion of deltoid, infraspinatus, latissimus dorsi, subscapularis, triceps long head and triceps lateral head. Muscle co-contraction was analyzed quantitatively and was significantly different from muscle activity. This paper presents a preliminary research on the mechanical properties of upper limb muscles during steering maneuver. …The results can serve as references for vehicle design and performance evaluation using the physiological characteristics of drivers. Show more

Keywords: Driver, steering maneuver, musculoskeletal model, inverse dynamics, muscles of upper limb

DOI: 10.3233/BME-141087

Citation: Bio-Medical Materials and Engineering, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 2697-2706, 2014

Authors: Kim, Ji-Won | Kwon, Yuri | Ho, Yeji | Jeon, Hyeong-Min | Bang, Min-Jung | Jun, Jae-Hoon | Eom, Gwang-Moon | Park, Byung Kyu | Cho, Yeong Bin

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Incidence of falling among elderly female has been reported to be much higher than that of elderly male. Although the gender differences in the elderly were reported for the static postural sway, there has been no investigation of the gender difference for the dynamic postural sway. This study investigates how age and gender affect the postural sway during dynamic squat and stand-up movement. 124 subjects (62 subjects for each of young and elderly) performed consecutive squat and stand-up movement, 2 times in one session, and 2 sessions per subject. Center of pressure (COP) was measured using force platform during the …test. Outcome measures included peak-to-peak sways of the COP (COP sway) in the sagittal plane (anteroposterior) and frontal plane (mediolateral) and also those normalized by body height. Two-way ANOVA and post-hoc comparisons were performed for the outcome measures with the independent factors of age and gender. All outcome measures, excluding mediolateral COP sway, showed significant interaction of age and gender (p<0.05). Post-hoc test revealed that only female showed increase in COP sway with age. When normalized by height, increase in COP sways (both directions) with age significant only in women resulted in greater sways in elderly female than elderly male. This may be related to the greater fall rate of elderly female than that of elderly men while performing dynamic activities. Show more

Keywords: COP sway, dynamic activities, squat and stand-up, gender difference

DOI: 10.3233/BME-141088

Citation: Bio-Medical Materials and Engineering, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 2707-2713, 2014

Authors: Wang, Yu | Shen, Xuanjing | Chen, Haipeng | Zhai, Yujie

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: To realize effective and rapid dynamic biometric identification with low computational complexity, a video-based facial texture program that extracts local binary patterns from three orthogonal planes in the frequency domain of the Gabor transform (GLBP-TOP) was proposed. Firstly, each normalized face was transformed by Gabor wavelet to get the enhanced Gabor magnitude map, and then the LBP-TOP operator was applied to the maps to extract video texture. Finally, weighted Chi square statistics based on the Fisher Criterion were used to realize the identification. The proposed algorithm was proved effective through the biometric experiments using the Honda/UCSD database, and was robust …against changes of illumination and expressions. Show more

Keywords: Biometric identification, gabor filters, LBP-TOP, fisher criterion

DOI: 10.3233/BME-141089

Citation: Bio-Medical Materials and Engineering, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 2715-2724, 2014

Authors: Wang, Hang | He, Yong | Yang, Min | Yan, Qingguo | You, Fusheng | Fu, Feng | Wang, Ting | Huo, Xuyang | Dong, Xiuzhen | Shi, Xuetao

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: The dielectric properties of human liver were determined by characterization of tissue absorption and coupling of electromagnetic energy in the electromagnetic field. In this study the ex-vivo dielectric properties of human hepatocellular carcinoma (well and moderately differentiated), liver hemangioma, hepatic fibrosis (stages S1 and S2), and normal liver tissue were measured and analyzed over the frequency range of 10 Hz to 100 MHz. The dielectric properties over the frequency range can reflect tissue information including biological macromolecules, vesicles, and cellular membrane; these information aids in distinguishing different physiological states and lesions. The ex-vivo conductivity, permittivity, resistivity, as well as the …characteristic parameters between the lesions and normal liver were analyzed and their differences were also verified. The data can contribute to developing bioelectric applications for tissue diagnostics and creating more accurate computer models for medical applications. Show more

Keywords: Dielectric property, characteristic parameters, liver cancer, hepatic fibrosis

DOI: 10.3233/BME-141090

Citation: Bio-Medical Materials and Engineering, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 2725-2732, 2014

Authors: Xie, Zhihua | Liu, Guodong

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: To improve the performance of infrared face recognition for time-lapse data, a new construction of blood perfusion is proposed based on bio-heat transfer. Firstly, by quantifying the blood perfusion based on Pennes equation, the thermal information is converted into blood perfusion rate, which is stable facial biological feature of face image. Then, the separability discriminant criterion in Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) domain is applied to extract the discriminative features of blood perfusion information. Experimental results demonstrate that the features of blood perfusion are more concentrative and discriminative for recognition than those of thermal information. The infrared face recognition based on …the proposed blood perfusion is robust and can achieve better recognition performance compared with other state-of-the-art approaches. Show more

Keywords: Feature extraction, infrared image, face recognition, blood perfusion, bio-heat transfer model

DOI: 10.3233/BME-141091

Citation: Bio-Medical Materials and Engineering, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 2733-2742, 2014

Authors: Fan, Shengli | Yu, Mei | Wang, Yigang | Jiang, Gangyi

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Stereo light microscopes (SLM) with narrow vision and shallow depth of field are widely used in micro-domain research. In this paper, we propose a depth estimation method of micro objects based on geometric transformation. By analyzing the optical imaging geometry, the definition of geometric transformation distance is given and the depth-distance relation express is obtained. The parameters of geometric transformation and express are calibrated with calibration board images captured in aid of precise motorized stage. The depth of micro object can be estimated by calculating the geometric transformation distance. The proposed depth-distance relation express is verified using an experiment in …which the depth map of an Olanzapine tablet surface is reconstructed. Show more

Keywords: Stereo light microscope, camera calibration, depth reconstruction, geometric transformation distance

DOI: 10.3233/BME-141092

Citation: Bio-Medical Materials and Engineering, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 2743-2749, 2014

Authors: Wang, Ting | Dong, Junyu | Sun, Xin | Zhang, Shu | Wang, Shengke

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Facial nerve paralysis is a common disease due to nerve damage. Most approaches for evaluating the degree of facial paralysis rely on a set of different facial movements as commanded by doctors. Therefore, automatic recognition of the patterns of facial movement is fundamental to the evaluation of the degree of facial paralysis. In this paper, a novel method named Active Shape Models plus Local Binary Patterns (ASMLBP) is presented for recognizing facial movement patterns. Firstly, the Active Shape Models (ASMs) are used in the method to locate facial key points. According to these points, the face is divided into eight …local regions. Then the descriptors of these regions are extracted by using Local Binary Patterns (LBP) to recognize the patterns of facial movement. The proposed ASMLBP method is tested on both the collected facial paralysis database with 57 patients and another publicly available database named the Japanese Female Facial Expression (JAFFE). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is efficient for both paralyzed and normal faces. Show more

Keywords: Facial paralysis, facial movement, active shape models, local binary patterns

DOI: 10.3233/BME-141093

Citation: Bio-Medical Materials and Engineering, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 2751-2760, 2014

Authors: Jin, Bo | Vai, Mang I.

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Ultrasonic diagnosis that is convenient and nondestructive to the human body is widely used in medicine. In clinical, ultrasonic backscattered signals characteristics are utilized to acquire information of the human body tissues to perform diagnosis. In this paper, an adaptive ultrasonic backscattered signal processing technique for instantaneous characteristic frequency detection based on the marginal spectrum is presented. In the beginning, the ultrasonic backscattered signal is decomposed into a series of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) by the Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) algorithm. Then the Hilbert spectrum is gained by the Hilbert transform on the IMFs decomposed and screened. Finally, the …time-frequency information in the Hilbert spectrum is utilized to extract the instantaneous characteristic frequency based on the marginal spectrum features to detect the objective. With this technique, the spacing between tissues can be estimated for tissue characterization by processing multiple echoes even in the complicated environment. In the simulation study, comparing with the FFT, the technique presented shows its strong noise immunity and indicates its validity in instantaneous characteristic frequency detection. Show more

Keywords: Ultrasonics, EEMD, Hilbert spectral analysis, instantaneous characteristic frequency, simulations

DOI: 10.3233/BME-141094

Citation: Bio-Medical Materials and Engineering, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 2761-2770, 2014

Authors: Zhu, Haijiang | Yang, Ping | Yao, Tianbin

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: This paper investigates a 3D reconstruction based on the ultrasonic scanned data for tissue mimicking material (TMM) sample. A two-step varied window filter is developed to smooth ultrasound backscatter signals at first. Next, the anisotropic diffusion filter with a triangular window is presented to reduce the noise of the 2D images by aligning one-dimensional signals. Finally, the 3D structure of the object embedded in the TMM sample is reconstructed using the detected edges images. The performance of the proposed method is analyzed and validated through a number of experiments in both 2D imaging and 3D reconstruction.

Keywords: 3D ultrasound reconstruction, tissue mimicking materials, two-step varied window filter, anisotropic diffusion filter

DOI: 10.3233/BME-141095

Citation: Bio-Medical Materials and Engineering, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 2771-2781, 2014

Authors: Zhang, Zhihong | Liu, Haolin | Cheng, Yangjie

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Ultrasound elastography is the method of obtaining relative stiffness information of biological tissue, which plays an important role in early diagnosis. Generally, a gradient-based strain imaging algorithm assumes that motion only occurs in an axial direction. However, because tissue has different relative stiffness, the scatter presents lateral motion under high freehand compression. Therefore, errors occur in estimating the cross-correlation phase in the calculation window. A 2D elastography algorithm with lateral displacement estimation using statistics was proposed to reduce errors. The new method was investigated through simulation, and the experiment confirmed that errors introduced by lateral tissue movement have been greatly …reduced with no sacrifice of real-time ultrasonic imaging quality. Show more

Keywords: 2D elastography, lateral motion, cross-correlation, statistics

DOI: 10.3233/BME-141096

Citation: Bio-Medical Materials and Engineering, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 2783-2791, 2014