Applied Mechanics and Materials Vols. 479-480

Abstract: The measurement of anesthetic depth is necessary in anesthesiology. NN10 is very simple method among the RR intervals analysis methods. NN10 parameter means the numbers of above the 10 ms intervals of the normal to normal RR intervals. Bispectrum analysis is defined as 2D FFT. EEG signal reflected the non-linear peristalsis phenomena according to the change brain function. After analyzing the bispectrum of the 2 dimension, the most significant power spectrum density peaks appeared abundantly at the specific area in awakening and anesthesia state. These points are utilized to create the new index since many peaks appeared at the specific area in the frequency coordinate. The measured range of an index was 0-100. An index is 20-50 at an anesthesia, while the index is 90-60 at the awake.In this paper, the relation between NN10 parameter using ECG and bisepctrum index using EEG is observed to estimate the depth of anesthesia during anesthesia and then we estimated the utility of the anesthetic.

Abstract: This study was conducted to investigate changes in gait pattern that appear after somatosensory stimulation evoked by applying mechanical vibration to the ankle. The gait pattern was observed in a real time using a footswitch mounted on the soles of the feet in order to increase the effectiveness of vibration stimulation. Based on the observed gait pattern, the application site and time of vibration stimulation were determined. The changes in the gait pattern that appear after the application of vibration stimulation were analyzed by comparing the percentage of the gait cycle and the activation of the lower extremity muscles. This study was conducted on young adults, and the result showed that the gait cycle was changed according to the application site of vibrating stimulation, and that the vibration stimulation with intensity less than the threshold, induced a similar effect as shown in vibration stimulation with threshold intensity. The result of this study shows that vibration stimulation could be effectively utilized for gait correction and rehabilitation. It can be also used as basic data for inferring the correlation of the characteristics of vibration stimulation with gait variability.

Abstract: Brain dynamics is an important issue in understanding child development. However, very little research of the event-related responses has been used to explore changes during childhood. The aim of this study was to investigate mature changes in spatiotemporal organization of brain dynamics. We hypothesized that oscillatory event-related brain activity were affected by age-related changes. The sample include three age groups, namely 7 years (N = 18), 11 years (N = 18), and adults (N = 18). The event-related spectral power (ERPSP), and inter-trial phase locking (ITPL) of the event-related potentials (ERPs) were obtained from the time-frequency analysis of the auditory oddball task. Results revealed that: (a) decreased theta power, but alpha power increased with age; (b) the values of ITPL in the theta and alpha bands increased with age. These suggest that ERPSP, and ITPL provide useful indicators of cognitive maturation processes in children aged 7 and 11 years.

Abstract: Photoplethysmography (PPG) is a noninvasive bio-signal measurement technique used to monitor peripheral hemal circulatory circumstance. Generally, PPG signal is treated as a morphologically equivalent signal of pulse signals. To prevent the affection of environment noise or motion artifact, an empirical mode decomposition (EMD) base filter with L2 norm similarity selector is proposed in this article. In this experiment, PPG signal of twelve healthy subjects is acquired with a stable state. The acquired PPG signals are mixed with different level white noise to exam the filter capability. 30dB SNR and 60dB SNR noisy PPG signals were adopted and applied with empirical mode decomposition to extract the imply mode of the input signal. After that, a l2-norm calculation is used to evaluate the similarity between each extracted intrinsic mode function (IMF) and the input signal. The high similarity IMFs are collected and used to reconstruct the filtered signal. Although the reconstructed signals may suffer a serious boundary effect as EMD faced, the results show effective noise elimination and prove the l2-EMD filter capability of PPG signals.

Abstract: In this paper, the application of the supervised learning system to automatic classification of leukocytes processing for the microscopic images analysis is presented. The traditional pattern classification in cellular images is typically made by experienced operators. Such procedures may present a non-standard and unstable accuracy when it depends on the operator’s capabilities and tiredness. In this study, we propose the supervised learning system to achieve an automated segmentation and classification of leukocytes based on supervised neural networks and image processing methods. The experimental results show that the proposed automatic classification learning system can effectively classify the five types of the leukocytes in microscopic cell images, as well as to compare the classification results to those obtained by the medical experts.

Abstract: This paper investigates the thermal behavior in laser-irradiated layered tissue, which was stratified into skin, fat, and muscle. A modified nonFourier equation of bio-heat transfer was developed based on the second-order Taylor expansion of dual-phase lag model. This equation is a fourth order partial differential equation and can be simplified as the bio-heat transfer equations derived from Pennes model, thermal wave model, and the linearized form of dual-phase lag model. The boundary conditions at the interface between two adjacent layers become complicated. There are mathematical difficulties in dealing with such a problem. A hybrid numerical scheme is extended to solve the present problem. The deviations of the results from the bio-heat transfer equations based on Pennes model, thermal wave model and dual-phase lag model are presented and discussed.

Abstract: The conventional distance estimation system only uses a constant speed and a constant level of road elevation to estimate the driving mileage for a vehicle. This technique leads to a low accuracy. In the current project, a new estimation technique namely; the Contour Positioning System (CPS) for an electric vehicle has been proposed. The CPS has a better estimation on the electric vehicle battery usage because of the consideration of road elevation, regenerative energy etc. In order to perform the CPS calculation, the elevation profile of the selected destination must be known. In this paper, the technique to extract the elevation profile i.e. latitude, longitude and altitude has been performed and evaluated using Google Maps or Google Earth^Ò. This method enables the user to obtain the road information and compute the amount of energy needed to reach the said destination.

Abstract: This paper proposes high-speed VLSI architecture for implementing a forward two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform (2D DWT). The architecture is based on 2D DWT mathematical formulae. A pipelined scheme is used to increase the clock rate, which allows its critical path to take only one adder delay. The proposed design enables 100% hardware use and faster computing than other 2D DWT architecture. It is easily extended to multilevel decomposition because of its regular structure. It requires N/2 by N/2 clock cycles for k-level analysis of an N by N image. The proposed architecture was coded in VerilogHDL and verified on a real time platform which uses a CMOS image sensor, a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and a TFT-LCD panel. In the simulation, the design worked with a clock period of 132.38MHz. It can be used as an independent IP core for various real-time applications.

Abstract: The voltage-controlled-oscillator (VCO) is one of the most important building blocks in the system. The chip fabrication of VCO is made by TSMC 0.18μm 1P6M CMOS standard process. The chip presents a low power and low phase noise for IEEE 802.11a applications, the PMOS casecode and current-reuse cross-couple technology are designed to improve phase noise and reduce power. The measured results of phase noise is-120.87 dBc/Hz at 1MHz offset frequency from the carrier frequency 5.05 GHz, and operates frequency from 5.04 GHz to 5.895 GHz with a tuning range of 17.14%. Under supply voltage 1.65V, the core power dissipation is 4.05 mW.

Abstract: Recent changes in ongoing background activity are one of the most popular approaches to investigate brain activity for understanding child development. However, research using event-related responses of cortico-cortical connections to explore changes during childhood is rare. This study investigates mature changes in brain connectivity in associative reorganization patterns and hypothesizes that age-related changes affect oscillatory connections. The sample included children aged 7 years, 11 years, and adults. The 3 groups were studied in the time-frequency domain to analyze event-related cross phase coherence (ERPCOH) between different parts of the brain as they performed an auditory oddball task. Compared to the adult participants, the 11-year-old participants were found to have increased connectivity in theta (4-7 Hz), beta-2 (20-30 Hz), and gamma bands (30-50 Hz) in the early component (N1, 80-140 ms), although ERPCOH value decreased in the alpha-1 (7-10 Hz) and alpha-2 bands (10-13 Hz). Compared to the 11-year-old participants, 7-year-old participants had greater connectivity decreases in all frequency bands, most significantly in theta, beta-2, and gamma bands.