Recent Patents on Biomedical Engineering (Discontinued) - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2009

Minimally invasive surgery and less invasive medical devices mean less trauma for the patient, less likelihood of complications, shorter convalescence and significant cost savings. Surface modification is applicable whenever the surface of the device has to be bioactive or bioinert while the bulk material physical and chemical properties are opposite and have to remain unchanged, and when choice of the other bul Read More

According to the World Health Organization reports, chronic diseases are by far the leading cause of mortality in the world, which places an ever enormous strain on the world's healthcare industry. At the same time, mobile phones have been gradually adopted for solving some tough health care issues which are hard to tackle otherwise from conventional medical strategies. Since mobile phone is a most easily available elect Read More

Cardiac electric signals are currently the most informative source about the heart rhythm and its disorders, and hence, the use of adequate digital signal processing techniques is necessary to yield reliable diagnostic parameters, either to the clinician or to automatic monitoring systems. A number of systems have been patented during the last years, which are grouped in this review according to their application scope. In t Read More

Digital signal processing algorithms for cardiac recordings have been paid much attention in recently disclosed patents. In this second part of our review of the state-of-art patents, systems for sudden cardiac death prediction, as well as for apnea analysis, are summarized. Advanced digital signal processing algorithms for cardiac electric signals are specifically reviewed, including independent component decompositions, an Read More

Epilepsy is one of the most serious neurological diseases, second only to stroke, with a prevalence of approximately 1% of the world's population. Electroencephalogram (EEG), a summation of electrical activities generated by cortical neurons, was first recorded in 1924 by Hans Berger. Over the past decades, many researchers found that epileptic EEG is very different from that of normal people. As a result, the unique inform Read More

in vivo Catheterizations are usually performed by physicians using X-Ray fluoroscopic guide and contrastmedia. The X-Ray exposure both of the patient and of the operators can induce collateral effects. The present review describes the status of the art on recent patents about magnetic position/orientation indicators capable to drive the probe during in-vivo medical diagnostic or interventional procedures. They are based Read More

The past several decades have seen explosive growth in the reports of tissue engineering for tissue repair. All scaffolds of tissue engineering are made of special materials, known as biomaterials, which have been defined as “materials intended to interface with biological systems to evaluate, treat, augment or replace any tissue, organ, or function of the body” [D.F. Williams, The Williams Dictionary of Biomaterials, Liverpool U Read More

In Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), magnetic field spatial variations are used to codify the signal. The presence of static magnetic field in-homogeneities introduces distortions and artifacts in the images. To reduce these effects, magnets with very high magnetic field homogeneity in the Field of View (FOV), particular acquisition sequences and image reconstruction techniques have been proposed. Typical homogeneit Read More

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