Sharif Digital Repository

Heartbeat is the result of contractions of over 10 billion cardiac cells. These cells’ cytoplasms are connected to each other by gap junctions which are arrays of intercellular protein channels. Thus action potential can propagate from one cell to another and cause its contraction. In core-conductor model, one-dimensional microscopic representation of cardiac tissue, cells are attached to each other to form a ladder network. The parallel elements are connected to each other by series resistors which represent gap junctions. These resistors are nearly always considered as static elements. In this thesis I have investigated the effects of incorporating the dynamicity of gap junction resistors... 

The mankind has always utilized vision as the most essential tool in evaluating his environment. Currently, one of the most important research areas in computer vision is to characterize a three dimensional object through its features in a natural scene. This task may be conducted through a stereo vision system. The objective of this study is to introduce a quantitative measure in order to evaluate the operation of an automatic recognition system for selected hand postures. A key application of our proposed system is to train a prosthetic hand through surface electromyogram (sEMG) signals. At the onset of this process, the patient conducts a certain posture through application of sEMG... 

Gesture and motion evaluation are needed for a variety of applications. The use of human hand motions as a natural interface tool has motivated researchers to conduct research in the modeling, analysis and evaluation of various hand movements. In particular, human-computer intelligent interaction has been a focus of research in vision-based gesture recognition. In this work, we introduce a 3-D hand model evaluation method that offers flexible and elaborate representation of hand motion. We used landmarked points on tips and joints of the fingers and calculated the 3-D coordinates of these points through a stereo vision system followed by an HMM (Hidden Markov Model) to recognize hand... 

World-wide, Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) takes hundreds of thousands of lives each year. This chronic heart disease causes poor performance of the heart and insufficient blood pumping to the organs. A significant percentage of patients with CHF require heart transplants for their survival. The high cost of heart transplant, shortage of donor hearts and possibility of its rejection by recipients are serious problems of this type of treatment. Therefore a large number of heart patients are potential beneficiaries of artificial blood pumps such as Ventricular Assist Device (VAD) and Total Artificial Heart (TAH). Performance of these systems must be compliant and complementary to the existing... 

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a set of various physiological sensors for remote monitoring and controlling of the patient’s health status. Detection of anomalies, containing faults and physiological stresses, and distinguishing between them can eliminate the need for constant presence of specialists and decrease the occurrence of False Alarm Rate (FAR).A supervisory hardware platform for WBAN architecture is introduced and implemented in this thesis. The proposed architecture contains three sensors for recording of biomedical signals, heart rate, SpO2 and body temperature simultaneously and transmitting them to central node wirelessly through Wi-Fi standard. This proposed architecture... 

Learning disability (LD) is a neurological condition that interferes with an individual’s ability to store, process, or produce information. There are different types of learning disabilities affecting reading, writing, speaking, spelling, etc. Based on a study conducted by National Center for Learning Disabilities, 2.4 million American public school students are diagnosed with learning disability. They attend school in order to learn and be successful while they do not know their learning process is different from their peers. LD diagnosis in children is especially important as such cases must be identified early enough in order to provide them with proper education.This project targets LD... 

Congestive heart Failure (CHF) which occurs when the heart is no longer able to pump the blood sufficiently is a worldwide growing health concern. In the U.S. alone, an estimated 8 million people will be diagnosed with heart failure by 2030.Cardiac transplantation with limitations in donor availability, cannot solely resolve this global health concern. Therefore many patients must use alternative remedies, namely Artificial Heart and Ventricle Assist Device (VAD). The Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD) is a mechanical pump that is implanted in patients with congestive heart failure to help the left ventricle in pumping blood to the circulatory system. They are known to... 

Motor imagery causes Event related Synchronization/Desynchronization (ERS/ERD) in Electroencephalogram (EEG) signal. These potentials can be used as an input for a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) system. To do so, it is necessary for these inputs to be correctly classified. The quality of classification is severely affected by the features extracted. Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) algorithm is often used for this task. Some of this method disadvantages are neglecting non-stationary properties of EEG signal and its proneness to overfitting. Additionally, its success is highly dependent on the frequency band that the algorithm is performed in. The most suitable sub band is interchangeable... 

Simulation of cardiovascular system functionality during various physiological conditions is essential at different diagnostic and clinical levels. A first step in studying the roots of cardiovascular diseases and abnormal activity is to study a practical yet complete model of the cardiovascular system. In this thesis we introduced a new approach for defining the distributed model of the cardiovascular system. Initially, we chose an appropriate subsystem, namely Arch of Aorta, and proposed a distributed model for it. The elements of the proposed model were nonlinear RLC elements that simulate resistance, blood viscosity and vessel elasticity respectively. To minimize the system complexity,... 

Due to the increasing average age of societies, daily monitoring of the elderly activities is. Even activities such as sitting, getting up and lifting may be beyond the normal ability of an older person. In this context, the need to provide appropriate assistive devices for welfare and normal activities of this age group is raised. In addition, self managed rehabilitation activities which may be performed at home or work without direct involvement of a physician or physiotherapist is yet another reason where such devices may be of importance. For this purpose, specially devised robots may be utilized to accompany and couple with the upper or lower extremities as an assistive or... 

Ultrasound hyperthermia is a commonly used noninvasive approach to destroy cancer tumors. High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) is a technique based on hyperthermia. It creates short and local elevations of temperature at a focus site within the tissue of interest. The main goal of HIFU is to maintain the temperature between 50 and 100 °C for a few seconds (typically less than 10 s), in order to cause tissue necrosis. In order to predict the effects of hyperthermia, accurate and effective modeling is needed. This study considers a 3D simulation of the hyperthermia based on HIFU method in the liver tissue. Temperature distribution and lesion volume changes, with a temperature of above... 

Robust detection of human eye has attracted interest during the past decade. Certain research studies have focused on the capability of determining the location of the human eyes while few have been focused on its tracking. The main task in this study is not only a system with eye detection capability but also a robust and non-intrusive eye tracker system of the eye movement using the iris as a trace element within the image captured through the camera. Such utilization is particularly applicable in diagnosing of certain abnormalities such as Autism which result in distinct abnormal movement and behavior in the eyes. Proposed eye tracker algorithm was implemented using the Kalman filter. The... 

Ability to speak lucidly plays a key role in social relations. Consequently the role of larynx is quite important and timely diagnosis of laryngeal diseases has proved to be crucial. Since conventional diagnostic methods of the larynx are usually expensive or bothersome, the aim of this project is to analyze and classify diseases of the larynx with the aid of signal processing which tend to be faster and easier to implement and quite economical. This study utilizes the vowel sound /a/ and a well referenced database, namely MEEI (Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary) which includes 53 normal and 213 abnormal voices in 7 classified diseases. In this work, using existing signal modeling and... 

With technological advances in fabrication and control of prosthesis and assistive devices the importance of such systems has increased drastically. On the other hand the appropriate coupling of these devices, especially the exoskeletal systems with the upper or lower extremities is of immense importance as it is an integral part of the control system. In particular, the control strategy and its ability to adapt the exoskeletal system with the existing and physiological functionality of the user, is an integral part of the system requirement. In the controller implementation, a number of methods are proposed including using the excitation signal, similar to the existing neuromuscular system.... 

Physiotherapy is a major part of the rehabilitation process that is used to retrieve patients' physical ability. The recuperation feedback in the physiotherapy process has a twofold significance for both physiotherapists and patients. It helps patients regain their ability to recover more quickly, prevent recurrence of injury to the treated area and other areas, and motivate the patient to continue treatment. It also helps the physiotherapist to monitor the process of rehabilitation and ensure the correctness of the procedure. Meanwhile, many patients cannot maintain continuous workouts due to lack of access to the physiotherapist at home and inability to provide required feedback.In this... 

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is one of the emerging technological trends that paves the way for the next generation medical systems by offering proactive wellness management and early detection of diseases. WBAN, as standardized by IEEE 802.15.6, is a network composed of intelligent, miniaturized, low power sensors that are strategically implanted in, placed on, or in close proximity to the human body. The sensors have responsibility for recording vital physiological signals and wirelessly transmitting them to a central hub for further processing. In this study, we have first investigated the applicable channel models for a typical WBAN. Considering various scenarios with different... 

Recognition of hand movements plays a key role in both human computer interaction and rehabilitation activities. This thesis focuses on hand pose estimation and motion tracking through a model-based stereo vision-based system. To allow for a complete 3D motion, initially a simple hand model with 20 landmark points was constructed and used to track its motion through a sequence of stereo images. Furthermore, a skeletal model representing the kinematical features of the hand was utilized to provide a meaningful hand motion and gesticulation. To evaluate and eventually recognize the performed hand motion, Kalman filter and Kalman smoother algorithms were implemented to evaluate the efficacy and... 

Triple Module redundancy (TMR) is a commonly used approach to increase reliability in space applications. Applying this method, triple modules and voting circuits are implemented in a field programmable gate array (FPGA). In TMR systems when a single event upset (SEU) occurs, the voting circuit neglects the failure value of a module receiving the SEU and takes a correct value from the other two modules. The present TMR approach utilized for the combinational and sequential logic on the gate level shows that it is possible to write hardware description language (VHDL) code in a structured yet high level coding style to obtain the required redundancy. However using VHDL, the level of required... 

In this study a variational framework for joint segmentation and motion estimation is provided for inspecting heart in Cine MRI sequences. In the first work, a functional including Mumford-Shah segmentation and optical flow based dense motion estimation is proposed. However, the motion estimation technique is replaced with warping estimation in the second work to reach in more regular and smooth motion field based on tracking of cardiac boundaries. Both of these functionals are then approximated by using the phase-field method to make them suitable for extracting Euler-Lagrange equations. Numerical solution to the optimization problem, when the time and image spaces are discretized by finite... 

In many modern medical procedures, needle insertion is an inevitable part of the diagnosis or treatment protocols. The accuracy of the needle insertion is adversely affected by a number of factors. A needle, frequently assumed to be flexible, is inserted into a soft tissue and induces complex mechanical interactions that may result in considerable uncertainties. Tissue intrinsic characteristics as well as its deformation and rotation may cause dramatic complexities. This work considers the needle movement inside the tissue from the dynamics and control point of view. The proposed approach can be regarded as an initial step towards automation of needle insertion procedures; it can also be...