Invited Sessions

Microfluidic Systems for Cell Manipulation and Analysis

Organizers: Weiqiang Chen* and Raymond H. W. Lam (USA)

Microfluidic technology is creating powerful tools for study and control of cell behaviors from single- to multi-cellular organism level with precise and localized application of experimental conditions unreachable using common macroscopic tools. Microfluidic systems have shown unique advantages in performing analytical functions such as controlled transportation, immobilization, and manipulation of biological molecules and cells, as well as separation, mixing, and dilution of chemical reagents, which enables the analysis of intracellular parameters and detection of cell metabolites, even on a single-cell level. Thus far, microfluidic applications have been involved in many experimental parts of cell manipulation and analysis, such as cell trapping/sorting, cell culture/co-culture, cytotoxicity, biomolecular biosensing, PCR, DNA sequencing, and gene analyses. Furthermore, micro total analysis system, likewise named “lab on a chip”, integrates sequentially analytical processes such as pre-treatment, separation, and detection of samples in a single microfluidic device. This invited session will invite international scientists to provide a discussion on the recent advances in microfluidics-based techniques for cell manipulation and analyses, precise control of cell microenvironments, and disease diagnosis and treatment. Special attention is devoted to a number of microfluidic devices for cell-based assays, including single-cell sorting and manipulation, biochemical sensing chip, whole cell sensing chip, and in vitro cell and tissue microenvironments.

New Trends in Perinatal and Pediatric Imaging

Organizers: Enrico Grisan, Marius George Linguraru*, and Natasha Lepore (USA)

The link between prenatal, perinatal (the time immediately before and after birth) and children healthcare, and the role of early life developmental alterations in later life health is a lively topic in the research community. Thus, having the possibility of monitoring developmental health through imaging and quantitative imaging biomarkers will allow a better understanding of this crucial period of life and of its long-term consequences. Moreover, at variance with the vast number of  tools developed by the research community for studying adult and elderly patients, a limited number of these is addressing the specificities and difficulties of younger patients. This invited session aims at bringing together researchers working on perinatal and paediatric imaging, on image biomarkers discovery and quantitative image analysis of this crucial period of life.

Voice Frequency Analysis: Expectation for the Convenient but Powerful Diagnostic Tool for Neuropsychiatric Disorders

Organizers: Yuji Morimoto*, Shinichi Tokuno, Shunji Mitsuyoshi, Shuji Shinohara, Mitsuteru Nakamura, Masakazu Higuchi, Yasuhiro Omiya, and Naoki Hagiwara (Japan)

The relationship between disease and voice has been studied in the field of acoustic phonetics since long ago. They have been studied mainly in the frequency band (F1, F2 …) which are obtained by Cepstrum analysis of voice. They are influenced by the shape of the vocal tract called the formant (the cavity from the vocal cord to the mouth). On the other hand, studies using the fundamental frequency (F0) which is obtained as a lowest frequency by FFT also have been reported. F0 is affected vocal cord vibration, and currently there are various methods of F0 analysis. F0 contains a lot of involuntary components compared to the formant. Therefore, analysis of F0 is potentially available to diagnose various diseases. Now, the range of adaptation of voice analysis has expanded from the otolaryngology area to psychiatric areas such as depression and neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s disease. In addition, research such as differential diagnosis by voice and measurement of therapeutic effect has started. Such developments are largely due to the development of computers, especially the spread of smartphones. In other words, voice collection and analysis became possible in everyday life. Pathophysiological analysis by voice is noninvasive and remote, without requiring special equipment. This means that this technology can be a bridge between health care and medical treatment. In addition, it is possible to give objective indicators to medical areas that had only subjective indicators. However, there are many remaining issues such as language dependency and verification of biases by sex, age and so on. At this symposium, we will focus on voice as a biomarker which has not been used so far, and widely discuss the method of the pathophysiological analysis by voices and the system construction using them.

Modeling of Modern Devices and Technologies with Computational Human Phantoms

Organizers: Sergey Makarov*, Marc Horner, and Gregory Noetscher (USA)

During this 2nd annual invited session “Modeling of Modern Devices and Technologies with Computational Human Phantoms at EMBS”, we plan on exchanging ideas related to the construction and usage of efficient human models for various therapeutic and diagnostic simulations and modeling purposes. Both voxel and CAD models will be considered. We intend to pay special attention to accuracy of various simulation results and methods, and how this accuracy can be controlled. Another important issue is the simulation speed. We are also considering organizing an informal broader follow-up discussion on the evening of the same day. The session schedule will include talks from leading researchers and medical doctors.

Body Sensor Networks – Molcules, Radio, and Machine Learning

Organizers: Ilangko Balasingham*, Daisuke Anzai, and Masaru Sugimachi (Norway)

Data from the World Health Organization (WHO) show that the global population suffering from chronic diseases is increasing at an alarming rate. It is forecasted that by 2020 nearly three-quarters of deaths in the world will be caused by chronic conditions like diabetes, neurodegenerative diseases, and ischemic heart disease (IHD). For the prevention and better management of chronic diseases the involvement of the patients themselves is crucial. This can be achieved with the real-time monitoring of various physiological signals. The use of telecommunications and micro-nano-bioelectronic technology can significantly contribute to this goal through the development of radio frequency (RF) and molecular wireless biomedical implants. For this sake, a variety of biomedical sensors and actuators have been equipped with advanced wireless RF or molecular telemetry links thereby making available a set of implantable wireless solutions for therapeutic and diagnostic purposes. For instance, in-body sensors like the wireless capsule endoscope (WCE) facilitate the diagnosis of disease in the small bowel, which is difficult to visualize with conventional endoscopic techniques. In light of these breakthroughs, researchers and engineers are continuously developing technologies to add novel and improved features to existing medical implants, on-body sensors, and off-body processing for automatic diagnosis and therapy. Emerging research fields like molecular communications, ultra wideband communications, and ultra-low power electronics are but a few of the technologies that will facilitate the further miniaturization of implantable and on-body wireless devices with enhanced capabilities like high data rate transmission. This Session aims to cover recent research activities that address some of the design challenges related to the development of novel wireless biomedical sensors and actuators, their localization and imaging and control inside the body, and clinical testing.

Wearable Devices for Cardiovascular Monitoring

Organizers: Ki Chon* and Insoo Kim (USA)

There has been an emergence of novel wearable devices for cardiovascular monitoring over the past several years. While event and Holter monitors can be considered some of the first wearable devices for arrhythmia detection, with the advent of smartwatches, smartphones, smart-patches and accelerometer-based wearables such as Fitbit, long-term and cost-effective arrhythmia monitoring is now potentially realizable.  Paroxysmal atrial fibrillation detection is of particular interest as it requires long-term monitoring. This invited session’s speakers will detail the latest development of various cost-effective and long-term monitoring devices for arrhythmia detection including atrial fibrillation.  In particular, the latest developments on smartwatches, a novel patch and armband devices for arrhythmia detection will be discussed by some of the invited speakers.  Wearable devices for continuous blood pressure monitoring is another topic in this invited session. Due to recent advances in optical and electrophysiology sensors and algorithms monitoring cardiovascular parameters from different locations on the body, these advances enable accurate measurement/estimation of beat-to-beat blood pressure while traditional oscillometric methods with an inflatable cuff are intolerable to most individuals who require constant monitoring. Recent achievements in wearable blood pressure sensors will be discussed by some of the invited speakers.

Biomedical Data beyond Linear Correlation: Higher Order Statistics and Non-Gaussianity, Non-linearity and Multifractality

Organizers: Yoshiharu Yamamoto* and Patrice Abry (Japan)

Biomedical signals are often characterized by complex and non-stationary temporal dynamics that can be better accounted for by appropriately modeling higher (or sometimes non-integer) order statistical. Modeling higher order statistics is essential to account for temporal dependences beyond the mere linear correlation, for departures from Gaussianity and description of the tails of the statistical distributions. Dependence beyond correlation and the corresponding departures from Gaussianity remain so far weakly explored, often both because estimation of higher order statistics has generally been considered difficult to perform from limited amounts of data and by lack of conceptual framework. This has however changed significantly in a recent past. First, with the recent advances in biomedical sensing technologies and the resulting rapid explosion of the sizes and number of component of the data collected in biomedical applications, an accurate estimation of multivariate higher order statistics is becoming more and more feasible. Second, the formal modeling of complex temporal dynamics has received recently considerable efforts grounded in stochastic process theory, from various formal angles, e.g., measures of complexities through entropy rates, non-Gaussianity indices and elaborated scale-free dynamics (such as multifractality). Such concepts are also currently extended to the potentially multivariate nature of biomedical signals. The proposed Invited-Session will present the most recent developments of these methodological tools (multifractality, Point Process modeling, non-Gaussianity indices, complexity indices), applied to several large biomedical datasets, very different in natures (such as cardiovascular regulation, heart rate variability, locomotion data, and macroscopic brain activity imaging data,…). The proposed communications given by experts of the domain recognized worldwide, will not only present the results achieved using such tools on large size data, but will also discuss their theoretical or practical inter-relationships, as well as issues in applicability, limitations and tentative physiological interpretations, permitting to envisage potential transfer to clinical applications.

Neural Engineering Tool and Imaging

Organizers: Tae Il Kim*, Jae-Byum Chang, and Myunghwan Choi (Korea, South)

We propose a new class of neuroimaging technologies which combines a biomedical engineering with other research fields like neuroscience, material science, and chemical engineering. This interdisciplinary theme will suggest unique approaches enable to study and investigate from cellular-scale to single molecule-scale imaging with optical, chemical methods. The invited session has 4 speakers. Each invited researchers professors will have 20 min talk with 10 min coffee break. The biomedical imaging and microscope/fluorescence image processing are important parts of bioimaging referring to the techniques and processes used to create images of the human body, anatomical areas, tissues, and so on, down to the molecular level, for clinical purposes, seeking to reveal, diagnose, or examine diseases, or medical science, including the study of normal anatomy and physiology. Image processing methods, such as label free optical imaging, imaging informatics, and single molecular scale imaging, feature recognition and classification represent an indispensable part of bioimaging, as well as related data analysis and statistical tools. We believe this session will provide new challenging in bioimaging field for advanced biomedical engineering and deal with diagnosis of neurodisease.

Recent Advances in Ultrasound Medical Imaging

Organizers: Yangmo Yoo, Hyung Ham Kim, Ravi Managuli*, Jin Ho Chang, and Changhan Yoon (USA)

The purpose of this session in IEEE EMBC 2017, “Recent advances in medical ultrasound imaging” is to provide a platform to discuss recent advances in ultrasound imaging, including Multimodality Fusion technologies, Automated 3D ultrasound breast scanners, Advances in Ultrasound transducer technology, and Photoacoustic imaging. This platform provide an opportunity for experienced and new researchers to learn about new technologies and also begin exploring both engineering and clinical research opportunities in this area.

Nano/micro Platform for Bioengineering

Organizers: Hansoo Park* (Korea, South)

Recently, nanotechnology/microtechnology has been studied in the field of bioengineering and biomedical engineering. This section will introduce a variety of researches related to nano/micro delivery systems and nano/micro platform for biomedical sciences.

Brain and Physiological Networks: Methods and Applications

Organizers: Luca Faes*, Lei Ding, and Laura Astolfi (Italy)

Signal processing methods for the analysis of connectivity in physiological systems have been continuously developed in the past several years, gaining more and more importance in a number of fields ranging from biomedical engineering to statistical physics, applied physiology and clinical medicine. Nowadays, these methods are being extended both to multi-modal applications, where multiple acquisition modalities such as EEG, MEG and fMRI are employed to record the brain activity, and to multi-system applications, where tools for network analysis and connectivity inference are exploited to disclose interactions between the brain and other physiological systems such as the cardiovascular and muscular systems. Following these new directions along which the field of brain connectivity is developing, this invited session aims to provide a broad view of how the concept of connectivity inference has become a powerful and flexible tool to address problems at different levels and link different physiological systems. Contributions from leading experts in the design of multivariate time series analysis techniques will address their recent developments through computational and modeling approaches employing information-theoretical tools, coupled delay differential equations, parametric models and signal-adaptive time-variant analyses. The wide potentiality of such approaches will be discussed through their application to brain signals (MEG, Leistriz; EEG, Ding), brain-heart interactions (Schiecke, Valenza) and physiological networks sustained by neuroautonomic or neuromotor control (Faes, Boonstra).

Single Protein Sensors and Actuators

Organizers: Zuhong LU*, Anthony Chen (China)

Proteins function as sensors and actuators, and their interactions with other biomolecules, including other proteins, DNA or RNA are crucial for the regulation of various cellular and pathological processes. One consequence of these interactions is induction of protein conformation changes. Accordingly, there has been a great interest in developing strategies to sensitively measure and model these changes with high spatial and temporal resolutions. To date, protein conformation changes have been studied using electrical, mechanical and optical-based approaches. In this symposium, we will discuss and evaluate the merits of these approaches, with an overall goal of developing a complementary strategy to measure protein conformation change with nanometer spatial resolution and microsecond temporal resolution. Specific topics include: the use of optical tweezer and atomic force microscopy, as well as conventional and sophisticated models to characterize allostery within a single protein; the use of single-molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer (smFRET) to measure conformation changes at nanoscopic resolutions in solution and in living cells; development of a high-throughput approach for the parallel detection of conformation fluctuation features within bulk protein based on smFRET and TIRF (total internal reflection fluorescence); development of liquid electron microscopy-based technique to image single proteins in aqueous solution with resolutions comparable to cryo-electron microscopy (atomic resolution). Finally, potential applications of these techniques toward developing single protein electronic devices, such as nanopore for DNA/RNA sequencing, will also be discussed. We envision that these studies will facilitate our ability to decipher the relationship between protein conformational states and function, which will advocate for the development of nanodevices to improve human health.

Biomedical Applications of Terahertz Imaging and Spectroscopy

Organizers: Emma MacPherson* (China)

Terahertz light (10^12 Hz) is non-ionizing, and research to-date suggests that it is a safe technique to use for human imaging, either for screening or diagnostic purposes.  Terahertz light is very sensitive to intermolecular interactions such as hydrogen bonds and can therefore detect subtle changes in tissue properties as well as be used to probe molecular properties of proteins or pharmaceuticals. Terahertz instrumentation has improved significantly in recent years, paving the way for more applied research.

Biologically-Inspired Regenerative Systems

Organizer: Esmaiel Jabbari (USA)

The invited presentations in this session highlight recent advances and challenges in creating and engineering systems inspired by biology and nature that are regenerative. This session covers fundamental concepts in engineering of regenerative biosystems as well as the development and testing of the regenerative systems for applications in cellular and tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, drug screening. Topics within this session include regeneration in biological systems, biomimetic regeneration, biologically inspired protein delivery systems, biosynthetic engineering, and regenerating biomaterials.

Cellular and Tissue Engineering for Clinical Applications

Organizer: Soo-Hong Lee (Korea, South)

The past decade has accelerated the path to success in cellular and tissue engineering together with stem cells engineering for repairing or regenerating the functions of diseased organs and tissues. However, in fact, there are many things still with blocking problems that must be cleared before clinical applications. This invited session is aiming to facilitate a reduction in these blocking problems.

Clinical Review of Current Rehabilitation Robot Systems

Organizers: Jaesoon Choi, Min Ho Chun (Korea, South)

Although numerous robotic devices and systems have been being developed for rehabilitation therapy and training assist, still a few of them are getting limited clinical application acceptance. Due to technical similarities to other robotic systems and technology, especially those of humanoid and exo-skeleton robot, the research of robotics in the rehabilitation robots has matured relatively more easily, but, clinical acceptance has been long delayed and still in its infant stage. There are various explanation and background under current situation including clinical efficacy, medical economy aspect, technical imperfectness and etc. This session invites 3 renown speakers from clinical field of rehabilitation robot and is to provide review and perspective of clinical application aspect of rehabilitation robot and good opportunity for interdisciplinary discussion among engineers and clinicians of the field. Japan is one of top countries both in robot technology development and practical use of robot. Korea has many active hospitals that are aggressively adopting robotic technology for medical use and is one of top countries that use most medical robots and industrial robots in the world. Two representative speakers of the countries are invited and a representative from one of the leading companies of rehabilitation robot that have robot product in actual clinical use is joining the session with another view from the developer aspect.

Computational Models of Cardiac Electrophysiology and Mechanics

Organizers: Eun Bo Shim, Chae Hun Leem (Korea, South)

This session was organized by the Korean Physiome Society. The present session covers the following topics: Cardiac multi-scale physiological modeling: Cell, tissue structure and whole heart function Multi-physics modeling: Cardiac calcium and pH regulation, mechanical contraction, electromechanical coupling, vascular blood flow and related experiments.

Deep Learning in Biomedical Image Analysis

Organizers: Won-Ki Jeong, Jong Chul Ye (Korea, South)

Recent advances in “deep learning” have opened up many promising research directions in biomedical image analysis. The benefit of deep learning is its ability to automatically learn complicated features from the training data without much intervention of the users, which allows highly accurate feature detections and classifications required in the process of biomedical image analysis. In this invited session, six speakers will present their recent research results in biomedical image processing and analysis using deep learning for various biomedical imaging applications, such as computer-aided diagnosis, vision-guided surgery, CT and MRI reconstruction, precision medicine and genomics, and brain connectomics.

Frontiers in Perinatal and Pediatric Imaging

Organizers: Enrico Grisan, Marius George Linguraru, Natasha Lepore, Yalin Wang (Italy)

The link between prenatal, perinatal (the time immediately before and after birth) and children healthcare, and the role of early life developmental alterations in later life health is a lively topic in the research community.  Thus, having the possibility of monitoring developmental health through imaging and quantitative imaging biomarkers will allow a better understanding of this crucial period of life and of its long-term consequences. Moreover, at variance with the vast number of tools developed by the research community for studying adult and elderly patients, a limited number of these is addressing the specificities and difficulties of younger patients. This invited session aims at bringing together researchers working on perinatal and paediatric imaging, on image biomarkers discovery and quantitative image analysis of this crucial period of life.

Modeling and Estimation of the Respiratory System for Clinical Applications

Organizer: Nicolas W. Chbat (USA)

The respiratory system plays a key role in maintaining gas exchange balance in the human body, which is ultimately necessary to survival. It is crucial to correctly diagnose its pathologies and optimize corresponding therapies, especially in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) where the ventilator plays a central role. Mathematical description of the respiratory system would allow for better understanding of the normo- and patho-physiological phenomena. Appropriate tuning of the parameters of such a model could allow for personalization of therapy.

Pharmaceutical Engineering for Smart Drug Delivery Systems

Organizer: Lintao Cai (China)

We propose pharmaceutical engineering for smart drug delivery systems with discovering, modifying, delivering or designing drug substances or excipients through nanotechnology and nanomedicine, in particular, micro and nano formulation – nanotechnology/nanoparticles; drug delivery systems and nanocarriers; stimuli response for microenvironment; combination therapy; clinical translational nanomedicine; and so on.

Signal Processing and Modeling Techniques for Fetal Monitoring

Organizer: Ahsan Habib Khandoker (United Arab Emirates)

Fetal health is critical to peri- and post-natal normality with consequences for general health in later life. However, even when pregnancies show no identifiable risks, 100% healthy births do not happen. Doppler based fetal cardiac assessment provides significant information about the fetal development and well-being. Cardiotocography (CTG), which is a record of the doppler based fetal heart rate (FHR) and uterine contraction activity measured via a transducer on the maternal abdomen, is commonly used for fetal welfare evaluation. However, CTG has a very poor specificity because sometimes abnormal variability in doppler signal based fetal heart rate may not necessarily represent a compromised fetus. As reported in several recent studies, the indices adopted in CTG do not appear to have brought about a reduction in fetal mortalities. Fetal movements, particularly in early stage fetuses, often result in doppler signal loss and consequent mis-diagnosis. The Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists report suggests that more advanced processing of fetal Doppler signals should be part of a reliable heart anomaly screening. Consequences resulting from fetal hypoxia, congenital heart defects, arrhythmia and fetal growth restriction manifest in fetal heart activity. For example the interval between the onset of the R peak of fetal ECG and the start of ventricular ejection (i.e., the opening of aortic valve) and the interval from opening to closure of aortic valve, are known to be very sensitive indicators of fetal myocardial performance. However, given the strong non-stationarities in doppler signals, the challenge of reliably estimating fetal cardiac events’ timings under fetal movements still exists. This reliability is critical to any discrimination of heart-abnormal fetuses from normal ones. Papers related to biosignals derived from unborn fetuses (human or animal models) are solicited in this invited session.