News: ABSPIE recent initiatives

Dr Pecchia was appointed as Honorary Member of Bosnia and Herzegovina Medical and Biological Engineering Society, for outstanding contribution to development and growth of Biomedical Engineering in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Prof Tony Esty (Canda) wrote: "March 28th, 2018

Dear Leandro,

It is with great pleasure that the IFMBE/Clinical Engineering Division (http://cedglobal.org/) Awards Committee would like to inform you that your manuscript Health Technology Assessment of Medical Devices in Low and Middle Income Countries: study design and preliminary results, published in the Proceedings of the EMBEC & NBC 2017, was selected as a Best Manuscript for 2018. This award recognizes an individual or a group that published the best clinical engineering-related manuscript in IFMBE conferences proceedings and/or journals published in 2017. The main criteria for the award is that the publication must demonstrate innovation and research contributions by the author/s to the global clinical engineering and healthcare communities, and must help to improve patient outcomes through a combination of the following categories:

1.0 Originality and significant impact upon the clinical engineering field Original contribution to knowledge with an emphasis on the paper’s innovativeness in one or more of:

1.1 Global interest of subject matter

1.2 Patient safety

1.3 Best practices

2.0 Quality of arguments

2.1 Critical analysis of concepts, theories and findings

2.2 Consistency and coherency

2.3 Clear positioning of paper in existing international literature

3.0 Writing styleQuality of writing style in terms of:

3.1 Readability

3.2 Clarity

3.3 Organization of the article

The committee felt that your manuscript fully meets the above requirements.

Congratulations on receiving this award."

EMERALD is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network (MSCA-ITN) funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme. EMERALD is the coherent action of leading European engineering groups involved in electromagnetic (EM) technology for medical imaging to form a cohort of highly-skilled researchers capable of accelerating the translation of this technology “from the research bench to patient bedside”. EM imaging technology involves the
illumination of the portion of the body under investigation with low-power non-ionizing EM waves in the microwave spectrum and the use of the resultant backscattered signals to generate images of the internal structure of the body.
The objective pursued by EMERALD is to accelerate the translation of research in EM medical imaging into clinical prototypes. To this end, EMERALD will establish a group of 13 outstanding early stage researchers who will be the European leaders in this field, through a unique scientific and training programme. The EMERALD consortium involves academic institutions, industrial partners, hospitals and university medical centers.
Thirteen positions are available on fixed-term contracts for 36 months with a start date in either October 2018 or January 2019, depending on the host institution.
For more info click here.

Dr Leandro Pecchia, ABSPIE Director, participating to the meeting the First IFMBE African Biomedical Engineering (BME) Forum, (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2nd - 3th March, 2018). This was a kick-off meeting of the first African Scientific Society of BME.

The meeting was attended by 12 Sub Saharian Africa Countries: Ashenafi Hussein, Ethiopia; Guy Claude Nkundabahizi, Burundi; Prince Verhoustraeten, Democratic Republic of the Congo; Kelly Maint, Mali; Sudesh Sivarasu , South Africa; George Boadu, Ghana; Prince M. O. Mbah, Nigeria; Sam Byamukama, Uganda; Samwel Hhayuma, Tanzania; Salome Mwaura, Kenya; Kouemo Tchokodjeu Emmanuel, Cameroun; Roland Laleye, Benin.

Also IFMBE participation was extraordinary: Prof James GOH (Singapore, IFMBE President), Prof Ratko MAGJAREVIC (Croatia, IFMBE Past President), Prof Kang-Ping LIN (Taiwan, IFMBE Secretary-General), Prof Marc NYSSEN (Belgium, Treasurer), Prof Mário Forjaz SECCA (Mozambique, Developing Countries Working Group), Dr Pecchia Leandro (UK, Chair of the IFMBE Health Technology Assessment Division).

The two-day meeting was hosted from the Ethiopian Ministry of Science and Technology (Day 1) and from Africa Unite (day 2), demonstrating the huge support from African Institutions, which clearly see that BME and healthcare technologies represent an outstanding and unprecedented opportunity to reinforce social and economic growth in Sub-Saharan Regions.

This is the first time such a huge number of African scientific societies of biomedical engineers and technicians meet together to share their vision and draft a possible strategy.

The main outcome of the meeting was the decision to create an interim IFMBE African Working Group, which will pave the way to the establishment of a permanent working group, during the forthcoming IFMBE World Congress. The group, Chaired from Dr Ashenafi Hussien, will focus on several action points, including: reinforce networking among African and international BMEs and Technicians, using also social media; harmonize BME&T education in the region; promote BME&T research and Innovation; promote dialogue between BME&Ts and National and International Institutions; disseminate and promote African BME&T activities in the world.

During the meeting, Dr Pecchia presented the results of the African field studies performed as cooperation among WHO, IFMBE and ABSPIE (University of Warwick) cooperation, supported by the EPSRC Warwick Impact Accelerator Award.

Davide Piaggio and Georgy Namm, respectively PhD and MEng Student members of the Applied Biomedical Signal Processing and Intelligent eHealth Lab at the University of Warwick, were shortlisted among the 6 finalist teams for the IFMBE Student Design Competition WC2018.

Davide and Georgy have been therefore invited to present and demonstrate their innovative design along with other 5 other teams in the final at the Student Design Competition at the IUPESM 2018 world congress that will be held in Prague, Czech Republic this June.

Prof Siew-Lok TOH, National University Singapore and Chair of the Competition Panel stated: "We have received overwhelming submissions for the competition and I am very pleased to inform you that you have been shortlisted as one of the 6 finalists. Thank you very much".

This is a great result for our students, proving their quality and the advanced research-oriented University of Warwick teaching philosophy.

In fact, design, assessment and maintained of healthcare technologies for low income settings is one of the priority research areas of the ABSPIE lab, the School of Engineering and the University of Warwick.