Rochebond5493

Rotary blood pump (RP) is one of the most important devices in the treatment of profound heart failure and is known to reduce the pulse in the blood pressure waveform, especially when it is used for axial flow. In an outpatient clinic, checking the pulse of a patient implanted with an RP can help diagnose the patient's condition. For that purpose, animal experiments with healthy adult goats implanted with the EVAHEART system were carried out after obtaining ethical committee approval. Visual imaging of the goats' faces was recorded using a video camera. The pulse waves were clearly recorded using the newly developed pulse diagnosis system with video imaging and compared with laser Doppler flowmeter and time series data. Spectral analysis of the time series data showed the usefulness of video imaging from outside the body. Clinical applications are planned, and this newly developed method is expected to be a useful diagnostic method for evaluating the cardiac function in patients implanted with RPs in the future.The daily challenge for people with type 1 diabetes is maintaining glycaemia in the "normal" range after meals, by injecting themselves the correct amount of insulin. Artificial pancreas systems were developed to adjust insulin delivery based on real-time monitoring of glycaemia and meal patient's report. Meal reporting is a heavy burden for patients as it requires carbohydrate estimation several times per day. To improve patient's quality of life and treatment, several methods aim at detecting unannounced meals. While untreated meals lead to hyperglycaemia and in the long-term to comorbidities, treating falsely detected meals can cause hypoglycaemia and coma. In this paper, we propose to customise the meal detection to the patient's hourly meal probability in order to limit false detection of unannounced meals.Safety alerts are published by manufacturers of medical devices when unforeseen hazards are identified in the post-market phase of a device's lifecycle. Multiple problems were identified in 2017 with Lower Mainland Biomedical Engineering's process for identifying, assessing and actioning safety alerts. A quality improvement (QI) project utilizing "The Model for Improvement" methodology, was carried out to improve the process. The original process was centralized and relied on a single individual to carry out all alert management responsibilities. A new hybrid process was developed which involves both centralized and decentralized components with responsibilities shared across multiple stakeholders. The QI project resulted in the closure time for assessing and actioning high priority alerts to improve from 200 days in 2017 to 14 days in 2019.We apply a new hardware and software platform called the Hamiltonian Engine for Radiotherapy Optimization (HERO) to the problem of Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT) treatment planning. HERO solves large general-form binary optimization problems by decomposing them into sub-problems and approximating them using a quadratic pseudo-boolean function. Optimizing the resulting function becomes a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problem, which has been widely studied and has numerous applications in various fields. A Quantum Annealer (QA) approach has been previously investigated to solve QUBO problems, including IMRT optimization. However, the QA can only accommodate a small number of variables and requires several hours to obtain optimized plans. HERO acts as an optimizer for QUBO problems, which not only addresses these shortcomings but also relies solely on conventional hardware design while operating at room temperature. Selleck Verubecestat We evaluate HERO on seven prostate IMRT cases with clinical objectives, each using approximately 6000 beamlets. Our method was compared to the commercial treatment planning software, Eclipse, for both time-to-solution and plan quality. HERO solves most cases in about 30 seconds, with significantly lower objective function scores than Eclipse. The results indicate that HERO is promising for radiation therapy optimization problems. Additionally, HERO has the potential to be applied to Volumetric-Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT) and other complex types of treatment planning.Most image-guided interventions rely on surgical tracking and image/model to patient registration to establish a spatial relationship between the patient and the pre- and intraprocedural images, by using surgical tracking and localization systems. In this work, we characterize the tracking, registration and navigation accuracy using two different surgical localization systems - the NDI Polaris Spectra optical tracking system and the NDI Aurora electromagnetic tracking system - in the context of an image-guided renal intervention, using a 3D printed life-size model of a patient-specific kidney phantom generated from a CT image. Our results reported a 0.05 mm fiducial localization error, 0.70 mm fiducial registration error, and 0.78 mm target registration error, and 0.63 mm overall navigation error using the optical tracking, and 0.12 mm fiducial localization error, 0.78 mm fiducial registration error, 0.93 mm target registration error and 0.89 mm overall navigation error using electromagnetic tracking. Additionally, our study also showed similarity between the overall navigation accuracy using optical (0.63 mm RMS error) or electromagnetic tracking (0.89 mm RMS error) and the overall navigation accuracy achieved using direct visualization of the surgical scene (0.68 mm and 1.06 RMS error respectively), which serves as a baseline control metric.Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy has already demonstrated the ability to distinguish different tissues types, or tumors from normal tissue, or tissues displaying diverse degrees of pathology. When applying the technique, however, the necessity to make contact with the tissue often constitutes a practical limitation. Electrical Impedance Imaging (EIT), or in a broader sense, regional impedance assessment, struggle to assess different tissue conditions out of measurements from the surface of the body. But sensitivity is very small even for tissue a few centimeters under the skin, and in-vivo measurements are often not viable.The lung offer a third approximation by introducing a catheter though a bronchoscope, which is a routine clinical procedure. Measurements have been obtained by using 3 or 4-electrode techniques and allow us to distinguish, at least, fibrotic, emphysema or neoplastic regions from normal parenchyma. New instrumental developments, clinical measurements and preliminary results are presented and discussed.