Biomedical sciences instrumentation
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Human modelling is an interdisciplinary research field. The topic, emotion-affected decision making, was originally a cognitive psychology issue, but is now recognized as an important research direction for both computer science and biomedical modelling. ⋯ The work is based on Ortony's theory of emotions and bounded rationality theory, and attempts to connect the emotion process with decision making. A computational emotion model is proposed, and the initial framework of this model in virtual human simulation within the platform of Virtools is presented.
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Comparative Study Controlled Clinical Trial
Thoracic and lumbar spine accelerations in everyday activities.
The purpose of this study was to quantify thoracic and lumbar spine accelerations for men and women of different body sizes during daily activities. Measured spine accelerations were compared to determine if there were significant differences in peak accelerations based on gender, size, and spine location. ⋯ Based on the statistical analysis, it was determined that gender and body size did not have a significant effect on peak accelerations of the thoracic and lumbar spine. The findings from the present study are of great value to researchers in order to understand the acceleration patterns of the human body during low impact accelerations.
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Comparative Study
Head acceleration is less than 10 percent of helmet acceleration in football impacts.
Sports-related concussions constitute 20 percent of brain injuries each year in the United States. Concussion research has included a variety of instrumentation and techniques to measure head accelerations. Most recently, the Head Impact Telemetry (HIT) System (Simbex, Lebanon, NH), a wireless system that provides real-time data from impacts, is used to measure in-situ head accelerations in collegiate football. ⋯ The impact locations were on the side, back, top and just above the facemask on the front. By comparing these two measured head accelerations and the helmet acceleration during a pendulum impact, it is shown that the response of the head and the helmet vary greatly and the in-helmet system matches the head and not helmet acceleration. Specifically, head acceleration is less than 10 percent of helmet acceleration in football impacts; moreover, the HIT System is able to accurately measure the head acceleration.
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Clinical Trial
Reliability of respiratory tidal volume estimation by means of ambulatory inductive plethysmography.
Ambulatory monitoring of ventilatory parameters in everyday life, field research and clinical situations may offer new insights into respiratory functioning in health and disease. Recent technological advances that employ ambulatory inductive plethysmography could make monitoring of respiration outside the clinic and laboratory feasible. Inductive plethysmography provides a method for nonintrusive assessment of both timing (e.g. respiration rate) and volumetric parameters (e.g. tidal volume and minute ventilation), by which tidal volume is initially calibrated to direct measures of volume. ⋯ Furthermore, reliability estimates were high and consistent across respiratory measures (typically r's = 0.7-0.8). These results suggest the validity of ambulatory inductive plethysmographic measurement of respiration, at least under relatively sedentary conditions. Findings also point to the stability of individual differences in respiratory parameters over consecutive weeks.
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This study introduces a 3-D segmentation method together with a graphical user interface (GUI) as means to effectively automate the process of segmentation with the ultimate objective of integrating and visualizing diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in a fully automated 3-D brain imaging system. A secondary objective is to reduce significantly the segmentation time required to extract key landmarks of the brain in contrast to the manual process currently used at many hospital settings. The results provided will prove this important assertion. ⋯ The average speed of segmentation was just 35 seconds, a reduction of over 20 times of what is required for manual segmentation. In order to create a highly integrated interface, the segmentation results serve as input to a registration algorithm we are currently investigating and whose preliminary results support the significance of relying on an effective segmentation process. T1-weighted 3D Gradient Echo MR and DT images from 16 patients at Miami Children's Hospital were used for evaluation purposes.