Sharif Digital Repository

Medical needle interventions are a common technique for accessing tissue structures.In these procedures, needles are used, for example, to extract biopsy samples, brachytherapy, and to insert drugs. In TRUS guided prostate brachytherapy application, Physicians used ulterasound imaging to steer the needle and insert radioactive seeds into cancerous tumors to irradiate surrounding tissue over several months. Prostate rotation, deformation, and unavailability of imaging data during part of the insertion path result in misplaced seeds. To overcome these problems, in this research, we modeled the prostate, its membrane and the surrounding fatty tissue as linearly elastic homogenous material, and... 

In the literature of motor behavior, rapid and harmonious human movements and adaptation to limb dynamics are described with reference to internal models. Concepts of internal models in neuroscience cognitive sciences and computational modeling have been investigated and their structure and performance have been evaluated by behavioral, neurophysiological and medical imaging data. The purpose of the theory of internal models is to explain the mechanism of human movement. Based on this theory, the central nervous system uses internal models to predict and adjust movements and reduce uncertainty. Uncertainty refers to the unknown dynamics of the system due to the lack of access to accurate... 

Disconnections in neural paths from the central nervous system to the muscles or vice versa cause different neuropathies, thus paralysis in different limbs may occur. As a result of the lack of muscular activity and the decrease in blood perfusion in paralyzed limbs, problems like osteoporosis, increase in the risk of breaking, decline in muscle size, cardiovascular diseases, renal dysfunction, bedsores, etc may happen. In order to induce movement in paralyzed limbs, thus preventingmentioned problems, rowing exercise through Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) may be utilized. In FES, electrical Stimulation using current stimulating pulses is applied to contracting and relaxing muscles,... 

In recent years, steering percutaneous needle insertions with the aid of soft tissue modeling techniques has been of great interest. In this thesis an optical flow based motion estimation method is used to estimate tissue deformation. It also addresses needle tracking in ultrasound images for prostate biopsy and brachytherapy. The thesis reviews reported methods on needle insertion using ultrasound imagery and further introduces a projection based method (Hough Transform) for needle tracking. Considering that ultrasound images have releatively low contrast and high speckle noise content, diffusion and wavelet-based filtering methods are employed as noise reduction techniques. Next, an... 

When heart failure occurred, revascularization to body’s organs and consequently covering the metabolic demands of different sections faces with problem. Chronic heart failure is the first reason of mortality all over the world. Traditional treatment for CHF at end stage is heart transplantation. But some of patients don’t have the opportunity to benefit from heart transplantation because of aging, health conditions and lack of donors. On the other hand, Left Ventricular Assist Devices that are using for supporting a ventricle suffering from failure face with basic chalanges for example, backflow in lower speeds and suction in higher speed. These constrictions necessitate maximum and minimum... 

Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) are systems which enable a user to control a device using only his or her neural activity. An important part of a brain-computer interface is an algorithm for classifying different commands that the user may want to execute. There are several neurological phenomena that can be used in a BCI. One of them is event related de-synchronization (ERD), which is a temporary decrease in power of the mu and beta brain waves. This phenomenon can be registered using electroencephalography (EEG) and occurs when a subject performs or imagines a limb movement. The goal of this thesis is to implement an algorithm that would be able to classify EEG signal for controlling an... 

Wireless area body networks (WBANs) are a set of sensors designed to monitor an individual’s health remotely. These networks are required to transfer the data properly to the healthcare professional. Since there is no guarantee that no faults might occur, these networks should have fault tolerance capability such that they can maintain their main function properly. In this thesis, a method for fault tolerance in WBANs is proposed.In this research, to test the proposed method, a case study on sleep apnea disorder is selected for monitoring patients who experience sleep apnea. To this end, the Apnea-ECG dataset from the PhysioNet repository was considered which contains five different types of... 

Subcutaneous needle insertion is one of the key methods of limited invasive surgery in medical diagnosis and treatment. However, errors in needle targeting can reduce the effectiveness of such efforts. One of the main factors of errors is due to the human guidance of the needle, which many researches have approached in recent years, and among the suggested solutions is the use of automatic or semi-automatic assist systems. Considering the treatment of prostate cancer by brachytherapy method, this research has developed a semi-automatic physician assistance system using navigation based on the potential field method and ultrasound images of the needle location, and sliding mode fuzzy... 

Medical ultrasound imaging is one of the common imaging methods in modern medicine, which is used to diagnose and even treat some diseases due to its cheapness and harmlessness. Medical ultrasound transducer arrays have a significant error rate. They are a major cause of failure in ultrasound imaging systems. This problem causes a noticeable decrease in the quality of the images and medical misdiagnoses. The topics of accurate detection of the location and severity of the error or failure, as well as the compensation for weak transducers by signal processing methods, have received less attention from predecessor researchers. In this thesis, an innovative method for accurate error detection... 

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... 

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... 

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... 

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... 

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...