INESC TEC paper wins third place in competition for young researchers
Two researchers from INESC TEC’s Telecommunications and Multimedia Unit (UTM) won third place in the Young Investigator Competition, sponsored by the International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE), with their paper “Towards a Dependable Cardiovascular Surveillance System”.
The paper by UTM researchers Cristina Oliveira and José Machado da Silva was written as part of the SIVIC (Integrated Portable System for Cardiovascular Monitoring) project, which aims to develop a wearable coronary and cardiac surveillance device, including for stent-graft intervention monitoring after endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR).
The article discusses a new non-invasive system to monitor stents. “The system uses an interface by inductive coupling that captures the pressure levels measured by a cluster of sensors placed on the walls of the stent-graft”, explained Cristina Oliveira. Processing these signals together with other physiological signals, such as the electrocardiogram (ECG) and blood pressure, will yield better resolution and decision confidence with the information obtained, in order to identify flaws in the stent-graft and pressure sensors. The paper also presents a methodology that makes it possible to diagnose possible deviations from the LC values in pressure sensors, by measuring the reflected power and impedance in the reader circuit using a simple strategy to combine data. “Other strategies to combine data are being explored in order to improve the cardiovascular monitoring system and to achieve high levels of dependability”, stated Cristina Oliveira.
According to the UTM researcher, this award reflects above all a “recognition of the work undertaken and our contribution to the field of biomedical engineering, including the development of medical instrumentation systems that make it possible to obtain reliable information on the data captured by the sensors, taking advantage of data fusion and statistical analysis techniques”.
The Young Investigator Competition was held in Vilamoura, between 7 and 9 November, as part of the International Conference on Health Informatics (ICHI 2013), a conference sponsored by the IFMBE, the world's largest biomedical engineering organisation. The main theme of the conference was “Integrating Information and Communication Technologies with Biomedicine for Global Health”
The INESC TEC researchers mentioned in this article are associated with the following partner institution: INESC Porto and FEUP.
