Sharif Digital Repository

This research presents an efficient thermal-aware routing protocol based on Shortest Hop Routing algorithms for implanted bi medical sensor network. Implanted biomedical sensor networks provide a major application of sensor networks in the near future. These in-vivo sensor nodes collect desired biometric data and communicate the data wirelessly to a base-station through a multi-hop network. They generate the heat due to wireless communication and circuitry power consumption. A high temperature of the in-vivo nodes for a prolonged period might damage the surrounding tissues. Most of the protocols for sensor networks don’t take the thermal issue as a factor in the routing of packets. In its... 

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... 

Considering ever expanding applications of embedded systems in all aspects of human life, reliability and fault tolerance of these systems have become vital. To increase the reliability in a microprocessor as the most critical component of an embedded system, one may notice the essential role that is offered by its register bank. In fact the register bank is the most critical subcomponent of an embedded system, greatly affecting the reliability of the overall system. The operation of the embedded system is further critically affected through optimal and efficient usage of power as most systems relay on battery. In this project, to evaluate the availability of register banks various... 

Detection of blood diseases is one of the hardest branches of medical science. The human circulatory system mainly consists of three main components namely white blood cells, red blood cells and platelets. Many diseases are diagnosed based on qualitative and quantitative evaluation of these cells, such as cell’s quantity, size, shape and the color of the cells. For example, AIDS and blood cancer cause major changes in components of immune system i.e. white blood cells. Also, some features of red blood cells change in various diseases such as iron deficiency, anemia, thalassemia and other diseases like malaria. Rapid diagnosis and treatment of these diseases has a considerable impact on the... 

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... 

The human heart is a complex system that contains many clues about its function in its electrocardiogram (ECG) signal. Due to the high mortality rate of heart diseases, detection and recognition of ECG arrhythmias is essential. The most difficult problem faced by ECG analysis is the vast variations among morphologies of ECG signals. In this study, we propose an approach for y detection of abnormal beats and data visualization with respect to ECG morphologies by using manifold learning. In order to do so, a nonlinear dimensionality reduction method based on the Laplacian Eigenmaps is used to reduce the high dimensions of the ECG signals, followed by the application of Bayesian and FLDA method... 

Continuous and non-invasive blood pressure (BP) measurement systems generally utilize applanation tonometry and vascular unloading. Some of them satisfies the AAMI standards (|mean|<5, |SD|<8). Unfortunately they are hardly to be widely affordable due to the complicated mechanical structure and high production cost. Till now those devices are seldom being used in operation room and generally used in clinical researches. In 2000, a linear model using pulse transit time (PTT) to continuous and non-invasive blood pressure (BP) measurement was proposed. Due to the nonlinear performance parameters of the arteries, researchers have used nonlinear models to promote this method. Although the... 

Dnase I Hypersensitive Sites (DHSs) are known as comprehensive markers of DNA regulatory elements. The main function of regulatory elements is repressing or enhancing transcription of genes. Hence, the recruitment of the data is prevalent in many studies of genome. One of the applications of this data is to utilize it to predict active regulatory regions (Transcription Factor Binding Sites).There are different means to do this, divided in three major groups: first, the methods only use the number of DNase-seq reads that surround a candidate binding site. While robust, these methods do not reflect the shape of the signal. A second strategy uses a variety of approaches to model and identify... 

Tinnitus is a perception of sound in the absence of an external source. Tinnitus is commonly associated with the hearing system and the sound perception areas in brain. Subjective tinnitus etiology has not been fully understood. Recent researches introduce some theories by means of finding structural differences in brain of tinnitus patients in comparison to normal people. In most previous researches on finding correlations of tinnitus in EEG signals, processes has been performed in time or frequency domain. According to these evidence and great performance of time-frequency analyses tools, especially wavelets in processing non-stationary signals, we utilized wavelet packets to decompose EEG... 

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... 

Tinnitus is understood to be a repeating sound, often in the form of a ringing in one or both ears, in the absence of any external stimulus. There is no definite scientific justification for this condition, but this complication usually occurs due to hearing loss or after aging or acute trauma. A recent community-based epidemiological study found that 17.5% of 60-year-olds and older were suffering from Tinnitus. Despite the significant outbreak and the great impact of this impairment on the quality of life of people with this condition, no definitive treatment has been provided so far. Therefore, further research in this field is of great importance. One of the tools used to carry out these... 

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... 

Conventional MRI has been used to diagnose different types of brain injuries. However these methods have generally failed to diagnose mild types of injury. We are working on the specification of mild traumatic brain injury, using diffusion MRI data, based on a multi compartment simulation of white matter tissue. This effort is essential for better understanding of underlying tissue micro-structure changes in patients with trauma. Some studies have been used in similar data fitting approaches in order to estimate axon diameter distribution. Specifically, a comparative study between different Compartment Models has shown that “ActiveAx” model has the best agreement with underlying tissue... 

Neural modeling is a branch of cognitive science in which the behavior of the nervous system is described through a collection of mathematical relations. By using these models, it is possible to study certain features of the networks or predict brain responses to different stimuli. One of the important features in neural networks is the adaptation phenomena that occurs in different forms. All types of adaptation occur in presence of a constant stimuli through a set period of time. Adaptation causes a departure from the stable pattern of neural activities which makes the responses unpredictable. Hence, it is important to study the effects of adaptation on the network activities.This study... 

Flow Mediated Dilation (FMD) is a non-invasive method for endothelial function assessment providing an index extracted from ultrasonic B-mode images. Although utilized in the research community, the difficulty of its application and high cost of ultrasonic device prevent it from being widely used in clinical settings. In this study we show that substituting the ultrasonic device with more easily handled and low cost photoplethysmography and electrocardiography is possible. We introduce new indices based on the photoplethysmogram (PPG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) and show that they are correlated with the ultrasound-based FMD index. To this end, conventional ultrasound FMD test was carried... 

According to clinical surveys, it is estimated that chronic tinnitus is experienced by 10 to 15% of the adult population. Tinnitus is defined as the conscious and involuntary perception of noise or ringing without involvement of either mechanical or external audio source. In recent years, a limited number of studies have investigated the effects of applying transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to ameliorate this condition. TMS is a noninvasive intervention in which magnetic pulses are applied by a coil adjacent to the individual's head. In this study, electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are recorded concurrent and as a follow-up to TMS. This makes it possible to study changes caused by...