05.05.2020, 13-14, Zoom (link below)

Micro-Global Forum sessions on COVID19 set up by WHO (Adriana Velazquez).
We've joined forces with WHO to offer you frequent focused global conversations on key applied topics where the evidence base is shared, reviewed, and applied, particularly to address LMIC emerging needs. The purpose of these micro-forums is to give CEs the management information to pass on to senior stakeholders to showcase what solutions have worked elsewhere.

More information is available on the IFMBE CED website and WHO one.

The main results from the field studies in Sub-Saharan Africa were presented, with a focus on international standards, medical locations and donations of medical devices. No video available, but more information can be found in these articles:

[1] D. Piaggio, D. Medenou, R.C. Houessouvo, L. Pecchia, Donation of Medical Devices in Low-Income Countries: Preliminary Results from Field Studies, in: International Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering, Springer, 2019, pp. 423-427.

[2] L. Di Pietro, D. Piaggio, I. Oronti, A. Maccaro, R.C. Houessouvo, D. Medenou, C. De Maria, L. Pecchia, A. Ahluwalia, A Framework for Assessing Healthcare Facilities in Low-Resource Settings: Field Studies in Benin and Uganda, Journal of Medical and Biological Engineering, (2020) 1-9.

Luciano Mirarchi, Siemens Healthcare

21.02.2019, 13-14, in the A2.05b

Speaker: Luciano Mirarchi, Chartered Engineer - Member of Institution of Engineering and Technology, has been working by Siemens Healthcare since 1982 up to Education Manager. He joined the University Campus Biomedico in Rome as contract professor and he is teaching equipment for Nuclear Medicine, CT and MR. Author of many publications and books with focus on MR, CT and HTA.

Abstract : The service of imaging equipment is changing rapidly and the usage of AI is replacing the screwdriver. Fixing machines will move from on-site to online leading to a significant improvement of the reliability and a great reduction of downtime

Dr Marco Cinelli

26.02.2019, 12.00 -13.00, Oculus, OC001

Speaker: Dr. Marco Cinelli is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the National Risk Management Research Laboratory (NRMRL) of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Cincinnati, USA (current location) and Institute of Computing Science at Poznan University of Technology, Poland.

Between April 2017 and August 2018, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Future Resilient Systems (FRS) Programme of Singapore-ETH Centre in Singapore. Prior to this, he was an early career fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study and research assistant in the Sustainable Materials and Manufacturing Group of WMG Department, University of Warwick (UK). He also held, between May 2016 and February 2017, a visiting scientist position at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in Ispra (VA), Italy.

He received his Ph.D. in Engineering from the University of Warwick (UK) in 2016.

His talk

In his talk, Marco will present a structured MCDA process to conduct resilience assessment of nation-wide energy systems, i.e. countries.

He will focus on two main contributions of the research project, (i) the selection of the indicators which characterize the resilience of electricity supply at the national level and (ii) the comparison of the overall performance, based on the selected indicators, of 140 countries according to different normalization and aggregation functions.

From a practical perspective, Marco will show how the use of these various aggregation methods can support development agencies interested in considering decision-makers with different levels of trade-offs acceptance. This can help for instance the shaping of energy policies of countries where minimum performance goals can be guaranteed and highly compensatory plans are excluded at an early stage.

Marco will also introduce the MCDA Index Tool (http://www.mcdaindex.net/), a web software that provides a practical and straightforward guide for the construction of indices and rankings.

Here the forthcoming seminars all in week 3. Nice opportunity to see what it is going on around Biomedical Engineering.

1. Monday 15th of October 2018, 10-11, D2.02, Prof Julian Gardner, “The state-of-the-art in E-noses”

2. Monday 15th of October 2018, 11-13, D2.02, Prof Mike Chappell, “An introduction to Compartmental Modelling”

3. Tuesday 16th of October 2018, 10-11, D2.02, Dr Neil Evans, “The Human Locomotive”

4. Tuesday 16th of October 2018, 12-13, D2.02, Dr Vishwesh Kulkarni, "Machine learning for improving surgical safety and in-hospital care”

5. Wednesday 17th of October 2018, 10-11, D2.02, Dr Susan Chetwynd, "Ethics: research with Humans and Animals"

6. Wednesday 17th of October 2018, 11-12, D2.02, Dr Leandro Pecchia, "Medical device design for limited resource settings: the Warwick Experience in Benin”

7. Wednesday 17th of October 2018, 12-13, D2.02, Dr Vishwesh Kulkarni, " Predictive modelling techniques for disease diagnostics”

8. Thursday 18th of October 2018, 10-11, D2.02, Dr Adam Noel, "Using Molecular Communication to Model Biophysical Signal Propagation and Processing"

9. Thursday 18th of October 2018, 11-12, D2.02, Dr James Amor, "Activity and Behaviour Monitoring for Health and Wellness"

10. Thursday 18th of October 2018, 12-13, D2.02, Prof Nigel Stocks, "Design of True Logic Gates in Synthetic Biology"

Professor Ratko Magjarević, University of Zagreb

Monday 23rd April, 4 pm, D202 School of Engineering

Speaker: Ratko Magjarević received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1994 from the University of Zagreb. After his appointment in industry at the Institute of Electrical Engineering “Koncar,“ he joined the Electronic Measurement and Biomedical Engineering Group at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing. He is full professor teaching several courses in Electronic Instrumentation and Biomedical Engineering. As visiting professor he was teaching at Universities in Dubrovnik, Rijeka, Stuttgart, Trieste, Ljubljana, Madrid and Bogota. His scientific and professional interest is in fields of electronic and biomedical instrumentation, in particular in bioelectric potential analysis and in cardiac pacing, computer modelling of biological systems, in research of new methods for drug delivery based on electropermeabilisation and recently in research in biomedical and health informatics, in particular in research of personalised intelligent health systems and body area networks. Previously serving as the President of International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE) 2012-15, he currently holds the office of Vice-President of the International Union for Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine and is the Editor in Chief of the IFMBE Proceedings series published by Springer.

Aim: Moving the paradigm of health from just curing the disease to its prevention and prediction, and by introducing the empowerment of patients into health policies, health care and intensive use of numerous health devices for well –being, diagnostics, monitoring and treatment has entered life and homes of millions all over the world. All these new devices and technologies generated challenges to health care providers in managing the health care system and in managing the data generated by the system and all its parts. In addition to “classical” issues of health technology management, such as technology planning, selection, procurement, inspection, admittance, maintenance, and disposal, new technologies opened a series of considerations on accuracy, security and safety of medical data acquired by new technologies. With the endeavor to build future health systems on Internet of Things (IoT), or more precisely on Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), there is a lot to be agreed and put in order on technological side, as it is also from the legal and ethical point of view.

February 8th 2018, 13:00, Room F105/F106, School of Engineering

Speaker: Rita Stagni is Associate Professor of Biomechanics at the Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna. Her scientific production presently includes more than 200 publications in peer-reviewed journals and international conference proceedings. Her research activity, in cooperation with national and international scientific institutions, mainly concerns the application of measurement, modelling and control methods in movement analysis, in both physiological and assisted conditions. Recent research focused on the accurate real-time assessment of motor stability and balance in elderly and pathological subjects, with a particular reference, in the last years, to the maturation of motor control in children. She was member of the Board of the Italian Society of Gait Analysis in Clinic, 3DAHM group of the International Society of Biomechanics, member of the European Society of Biomechanics, and participated in national and international research projects as coordinator for UNIBO

Aim: As one of the so-called geriatric giants is considered, it is evident that falls represent a heavy economic and social burden, leading to a significant reduction in the quality of life in the elderly and/or pathological population. Therefore, it is easy to understand the great interest in the identification of effective methods to identify those at risk and to develop effective clinical / rehabilitative interventions aiming to reduce this risk. Unfortunately, however, extensive research and literature demonstrate how far from simple is this task; based on epidemiological evaluations, the risk of falling has a multifactorial nature, is affected by specific clinical conditions as well as by environmental conditions, potentially differing significantly from one subject to another. Both postural and motor stability are the result of the concurrent action of various functional resources.

In recent years, an increasing attention has been paid to multifactorial assessment, aiming at personalised intervention for the prevention of falls and injuries in the elderly subjects. Moreover, efficient wearable sensors have become available, allowing a constant and non-invasive monitoring of the movement during the activities of daily life. This resulted in the development and proposal of a large number of methods for the quantification of motor stability and the estimation of fall risk. The aim of this lesson is to provide an overview and a critical review of the quantitative tools proposed in recent years and based on the use of magneto-inertial sensors to summarise the advantages and the main limitations for the proper use of these instruments.

February 6^th 2018, 13:00, Room A401, School of Engineering

Speaker: Nicolas Pallikarakis is Emeritus Professor of the University of Patras, Greece; Founder of the Institute of Biomedical Technology (INBIT), Patras, Greece, in 1991; Past Chairman of the HTA Division of the IFMBE; Founding member of EAMBES Fellows; and Elected member of the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering (IAMBE). He is one of the creators of the international M.Sc. program in Biomedical Engineering (BME) established in 1989 at the University of Patras, Greece. Prof Pallikarakis has more than 130 publications in international scientific journals and conference proceedings. Coordinator of more than 30 European and Greek R&D projects. In the domain of BME education, he coordinated a number of Erasmus/Tempus projects. The two more recent Curricula Reformation and Harmonisation in the field of Biomedical Engineering (CRH BME) and the European Neighbouring Area (ENA) countries that created four new BME Joint programs in Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Armenia, based on the core curriculum proposed by the previously mentioned CRH BME project. Last January he has been invited to represent Greece in the Erasmus+ 30 year’s celebration launching event in Brussels and in June 2017, he received one of the 33 Awards given to Erasmus+ participants in a special ceremony at the EU Parliament in Strasburg.

Aim: In his talk, Nicolas Pallikarakis will give a thirty-year overview of the evolution in the domain of Medical Technology and its relationship with Biomedical Engineering Education. He will present the case of a unique European collaboration program in BME and will elaborate the direct and indirect benefits of such a joint effort.

Speaker: Dr Oreste Riccardo Natale after gaining a Ph.D. In information science applied to industrial automation at the Università degli Studi del Sannio in Benevento - Italy - founded an academic spin-off company called Mosaico in 2005. Mosaico designs and installs distributed control systems for industrial automation with particular experience in aerospace industries.

Aim: In this talk an application is shown where an industrial plant is augmented with holograms is realtime updated with the data coming from the plant itself.

Speaker: Dr Saverio Stranges, Scientific Director of the Department of Population Health at the Luxembourg Institute of Health. Dr Stranges has been appointed as the Scientific Director of the Department of Population Health at the Luxembourg Institute of Health. Previously, he was an Associate Clinical Professor of Cardiovascular Epidemiology in the Division of Health Sciences at the University of Warwick Medical School, where he has been for about nine years (2006-2015). Within Warwick University, he was also Director of the Academic Clinical Training in Public Health, as well as Honorary Consultant Physician in Public Health Medicine at the University Hospital of Coventry & Warwickshire, working in the Lipid & Coronary Prevention Clinics.

Aim: this will be an interactive session addressing the main criteria and issues in inferring causal associations in epidemiological studies.