Biomedical Commons^™

Using Machine Learning To Assist Auditory Processing Evaluation, Hasitha Wimalarathna, Sangamanatha Veeranna, Minh Vu Duong, Chris Allan Prof, Sumit K. Agrawal, Prudence Allen, Jagath Samarabandu, Hanif M. Ladak

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Introduction: Approximately 0.2–5% of school-age children complain of listening difficulties in the absence of hearing loss. These children are often referred to an audiologist for an auditory processing disorder (APD) assessment. Adequate experience and training is necessary to arrive at an accurate diagnosis due to the heterogeneity of the disorder.

Objectives: The main goal of the study was to determine if machine learning (ML) can be used to analyze data from the APD clinical test battery to accurately categorize children with suspected APD into clinical sub-groups, similar to expert labels.

Methods: The study retrospectively collected data from 134 children referred …

The Development Of A Motion Sensing Device For Use In A Home Setting, Jaspreet K. Kalsi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second most prevalent neurodegenerative disease, with over 10 million individuals diagnosed with PD world-wide. The most common symptom characterized by PD is tremor. Tremor is an involuntary oscillatory motion that most prominently occurs in upper limb, specifically in the hand and wrist that has a measurable frequency and amplitude. This thesis aims to evaluate the usability and functionality of a tremor sensing device designed to collect quantitative data on individuals with PD. The designed device uses 23 commercially-available inertial measuring units (IMUs) located between 21 joints: distal interphalangeal (DIP) joints, proximal interphalangeal (PIP) joints, Interphalangeal …

Effect Of Levodopa On Eeg Connectivity In Parkinson's Patients, Sepehr Torab Parhiz

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Levodopa is a dopamine replacement medication administered to patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) to alleviate their motor symptoms. However, its long-term use can cause adverse side effects, including involuntary motor movements. We studied 16 PD patients before and after taking Levodopa based on resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) recordings to determine how Levodopa affects the functional connectivity of their brain networks. We used several metrics from graph theory, in particular the minimum spanning tree (MST) metric, and analyzed how they change after subjects take Levodopa. We observed significant changes in the lower alpha band toward a more path-like and less globally efficient …

Liam Briggs 2021 Usri - Audio Testing Device, Liam Briggs

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Portable and cost-effective hearing testing device with a UI that can be accessed on a remote web server.

Design And Evaluation Of Neurosurgical Training Simulator, Trinette L. Wright

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Surgical simulators are becoming more important in surgical training. Consumer smartphone technology has improved to allow deployment of VR applications and are now being targeted for medical training simulators. A surgical simulator has been designed using a smartphone, Google cardboard 3D glasses, and the Leap Motion (LM) hand controller. Two expert and 16 novice users were tasked with completing the same pointing tasks using both the LM and the medical simulator NeuroTouch. The novice users had an accuracy of 0.2717 bits (SD 0.3899) and the experts had an accuracy of 0.0925 bits (SD 0.1210) while using the NeuroTouch. Novices and …

Interactive Visualization Of Multimodal Brain Connectivity: Applications In Clinical And Cognitive Neuroscience, Saeed Mahdizadeh Bakhshmand

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become a readily available prognostic and diagnostic method, providing invaluable information for the clinical treatment of neurological diseases. Multimodal neuroimaging allows integration of complementary data from various aspects such as functional and anatomical properties; thus, it has the potential to overcome the limitations of each individual modality. Specifically, functional and diffusion MRI are two non-invasive neuroimaging techniques customized to capture brain activity and microstructural properties, respectively. Data from these two modalities is inherently complex, and interactive visualization can assist with data comprehension.

The current thesis presents the design, development, and validation of visualization and computation …

Basic Science To Clinical Research: Segmentation Of Ultrasound And Modelling In Clinical Informatics, Ali K. Hamou

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The world of basic science is a world of minutia; it boils down to improving even a fraction of a percent over the baseline standard. It is a domain of peer reviewed fractions of seconds and the world of squeezing every last ounce of efficiency from a processor, a storage medium, or an algorithm. The field of health data is based on extracting knowledge from segments of data that may improve some clinical process or practice guideline to improve the time and quality of care. Clinical informatics and knowledge translation provide this information in order to reveal insights to …

Design Of Radio-Frequency Arrays For Ultra-High Field Mri, Ian R O Connell

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is an indispensable, non-invasive diagnostic tool for the assessment of disease and function. As an investigational device, MRI has found routine use in both basic science research and medicine for both human and non-human subjects.

Due to the potential increase in spatial resolution, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and the ability to exploit novel tissue contrasts, the main magnetic field strength of human MRI scanners has steadily increased since inception. Beginning in the early 1980’s, 0.15 T human MRI scanners have steadily risen in main magnetic field strength with ultra-high field (UHF) 8 T MRI systems deemed to …

Towards The Development Of A Wearable Tremor Suppression Glove, Yue Zhou

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Patients diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease (PD) often associate with tremor. Among other symptoms of PD, tremor is the most aggressive symptom and it is difficult to control with traditional treatments. This thesis presents the assessment of Parkinsonian hand tremor in both the time domain and the frequency domain, the performance of a tremor estimator using different tremor models, and the development of a novel mechatronic transmission system for a wearable tremor suppression device. This transmission system functions as a mechatronic splitter that allows a single power source to support multiple independent applications. Unique features of this transmission system include low …

Design Of Novel Sensors And Instruments For Minimally Invasive Lung Tumour Localization Via Palpation, Anish Srinivasan Naidu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Minimally Invasive Thoracoscopic Surgery (MITS) has become the treatment of choice for lung cancer. However, MITS prevents the surgeons from using manual palpation, thereby often making it challenging to reliably locate the tumours for resection. This thesis presents the design, analysis and validation of novel tactile sensors, a novel miniature force sensor, a robotic instrument, and a wireless hand-held instrument to address this limitation. The low-cost, disposable tactile sensors have been shown to easily detect a 5 mm tumour located 10 mm deep in soft tissue. The force sensor can measure six degrees of freedom forces and torques with temperature …

Magnetic Resonance Imaging Compatible Remote Catheter Navigation System, Mohammad Ali Tavallaei

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Many vascular and cardiac diseases are diagnosed and treated using a medical technique known as percutaneous transluminal catheter intervention (PTC). In PTC, the interventionalist inserts a catheter into the vasculature, and using the vessel as the guiding passageway, the catheter is navigated to desired anatomical targets where it would be used for various purposes such as catheter ablation for the treatment/management of cardiac arrhythmias. The catheterization procedure is conventionally guided with x-ray fluoroscopic imaging and more recently, but rarely, with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). X-ray imaging irradiates the patient directly during the procedure, and the staff and interventionalists indirectly through …

Evaluating Human Performance For Image-Guided Surgical Tasks, Matthew Kenneth Kramers

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The following work focuses on the objective evaluation of human performance for two different interventional tasks; targeted prostate biopsy tasks using a tracked biopsy device, and external ventricular drain placement tasks using a mobile-based augmented reality device for visualization and guidance. In both tasks, a human performance methodology was utilized which respects the trade-off between speed and accuracy for users conducting a series of targeting tasks using each device. This work outlines the development and application of performance evaluation methods using these devices, as well as details regarding the implementation of the mobile AR application. It was determined that the …

Image Fusion And Axial Labeling Of The Spine, Brandon Miles

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In order to improve radiological diagnosis of back pain and spine disease, two new algorithms have been developed to aid the 75% of Canadians who will suffer from back pain in a given year. With the associated medical imaging required for many of these patients, there is a potential for improvement in both patient care and healthcare economics by increasing the accuracy and efficiency of spine diagnosis. A real-time spine image fusion system and an automatic vertebra/disc labeling system have been developed to address this. Both magnetic resonance (MR) images and computed tomography (CT) images are often acquired for patients. …

Under-Sampled Reconstruction Techniques For Accelerated Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Mohammad H. Kayvanrad

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Due to physical and biological constraints and requirements on the minimum resolution and SNR, the acquisition time is relatively long in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Consequently, a limited number of pulse sequences can be run in a clinical MRI session because of constraints on the total acquisition time due to patient comfort and cost considerations. Therefore, it is strongly desired to reduce the acquisition time without compromising the reconstruction quality. This thesis concerns under-sampled reconstruction techniques for acceleration of MRI acquisitions, i.e., parallel imaging and compressed sensing.

While compressed sensing MRI reconstructions are commonly regularized by penalizing the decimated wavelet …

Biomechanical Modeling For Lung Tumor Motion Prediction During Brachytherapy And Radiotherapy, Zahra Shirzadi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

A novel technique is proposed to develop a biomechanical model for estimating lung’s tumor position as a function of respiration cycle time. Continuous tumor motion is a major challenge in lung cancer treatment techniques where the tumor needs to be targeted; e.g. in external beam radiotherapy and brachytherapy. If not accounted for, this motion leads to areas of radiation over and/or under dosage for normal tissue and tumors. In this thesis, biomechanical models were developed for lung tumor motion predication in two distinct cases of lung brachytherapy and lung external beam radiotherapy. The lung and other relevant surrounding organs geometries, …

Modeling Lung Tissue Motions And Deformations: Applications In Tumor Ablative Procedures, Ali Sadeghi Naini

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Various types of motion and deformation that the lung undergoes during minimally invasive tumor ablative procedures have been investigated and modeled in this dissertation. The lung frequently undergoes continuous large respiratory deformation, which can greatly affect the pre-planned outcome of the operation, hence deformation compensation becomes necessary. The first type of major deformation involved in a target lung throughout a tumor ablative procedure is the one encountered in procedures where the lung is totally deflated before starting the operation. A consequence of this deflation is that pre-operative images (acquired while the lung was partially inflated) become inaccurate for targeting the …