Sharif Digital Repository

Governments in developing countries have invested in institutions of higher learning in order to develop homegrown, high technology products. Among these, the National University of Malaysia (Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia), recognized as a Research University, is actively involved in projects related to medical technology through its various faculties. The net result of these activities is impressing from the point of view of patents and publications, but unfortunately not yet in terms of commercialization. This paper starts by presenting the main obstacles towards the objective of bringing a laboratory prototype to the market in the context of Malaysia. Then, a framework is presented... 

In this paper, we develop the machinery of real interference alignment. This machinery is extremely powerful in achieving the sum degrees of freedom (DoF) of single antenna systems. The scheme of real interference alignment is based on designing single-layer and multilayer constellations used for modulating information messages at the transmitters. We show that constellations can be aligned in a similar fashion as that of vectors in multiple antenna systems and space can be broken up into fractional dimensions. The performance analysis of the signaling scheme makes use of a recent result in the field of Diophantine approximation, which states that the convergence part of the... 

Multi-site photoplethysmography is an optoelectronic technique that measures changes in blood volume associated with cardiac contraction. Photoplethysmogram (PPG) recording enables researchers to study the vascular and hemodynamic properties of human subjects. Currently, there is no commercial system available in the market to perform multi-channel PPG recording. The measurements can be obtained from fingertips, ear lobes and toes due to their low absorption and high degree of vasculature. The main objective of this project is to develop a suitable data compression algorithm for two-channel simultaneous high resolution wireless PPG recording system. MATLAB software was used during the... 

Cardiovascular diseases contribute to one third of the world's mortality and morbidity, therefore early cardiovascular disease diagnosis, treatment and monitoring has become an important market. Ideally, an early diagnosis device will need to be accurate, non-invasive, low cost and operator independent. Interestingly enough, there is a wide range of non-invasive devices available, but each with a different degree of accuracy and ease of use. In this paper, an attempt has been made to review commercially available technologies for non-invasive vascular screening. As stiffness index, reflection index, augmentation index, central aortic pressure are most commonly used to screen for vascular... 

In the presence of self and cross saturation effects, the laser governing equations are nonlinear. To solve the governing equations of a fiber Bragg grating random laser, on the basis of the transfer matrix method, a simple and fast iterative method is introduced. The method is employed to obtain the frequency, threshold pumping rate and spatial distribution of different laser modes. Numerical calculations show that by increasing the number of fiber Bragg grating, the number of lasing modes increases, while the threshold pumping rate of the first mode decreases. Our theoretical results are in agreement with the experimental observations reported by previous authors  

The development of a synthetic model of a pregnant woman abdomen with amniotic fluid and a fetus is discussed comprehensively in this paper. The model is intended to be used for studying the light propagation through physical 3D model of pregnant woman in reflectance mode. To construct the model, reported dimension values of body curvature in 26 and 28 weeks of pregnant woman are being used as main references. Although slightly adjustments have been made to the body dimensions, the values are still within the range of reference values. Optical simulation has been performed in order to test the model capability. Given the reasonable computational time and encouraging preliminary results, the... 

In this paper, the lasing action in three-dimensional active random systems has been numerically investigated. Here, random systems of spherical dielectric particles imbedded in an active medium are considered. The quasi steady state approximation for the population inversion of the active medium is applied to solve three dimensional governing equations. Results show that when the density of particles increases to an upper limit, the intensity of lasing modes is enhanced. Also, the effects of pumping rate and particle size on the number of lasing modes and their intensity are studied. Lasing threshold of laser modes in different disordered systems is calculated and it is shown that by an... 

In this paper, the Monte Carlo technique is used to determine the optical detection strategies in three-layered (maternal, amniotic fluid and fetal) tissue model. This model is utilized to estimate the transabdominal optical power and optimum source-detector (S-D) separation. Results based on the launching of 2 million photons with 1 mW optical power showed that the expected optical power output is in the range of 10 -6-10 -10 W/cm 2 depending on S-D separation. Considering the limit of the signal processing methods (such as adaptive noise cancelling) and the use of silicon photodetector, an S-D separation of 4 cm has been selected as a practical compromise between signal level and... 

A new reflectance optical sensor array for locating fetal signal transabdominally has been determined in this study. The selection of optical sensor array is based on the highest Irradiance (μW/m2) value estimated on respected detectors. A three-layer semi-infinite tissue model which consists of maternal, amniotic fluid sac and fetal tissues is employed to study the optical sensor array configuration. By using statistical error approach, the number of rays injected to the system can be set to 1 million rays with ±3.2% of simulation error. The simulation results obtained from Monte Carlo technique reveal that diamond configuration is the most suitable configuration of reflectance optical... 

The noninvasive fetal electrocardiogram (ECG) data available from Physionet data bank are suitable for developing fetal heart rate (FHR) detection algorithms. The data have been collected from single subject with a broad range of gestation weeks, and have a total data length of more than 9 hours arranged in 55 data sets. However, there are three additional data features which are currently not directly available from Physionet to facilitate the easy usage of these data: (1) the fetal peak visibility evaluation, (2) the gestation week, and (3) the data length. This article presents an improvement to the data bank by providing the additional features. The required pre-processing of the data is... 

In an effort to identify a useful noninvasive screening tool for cardiovascular diseases (CVD) screening, photoplethysmograph (PPG) signals were acquired and analyzed. These PPG signals were recorded during reactive hyperemia experiments consisting of a 4-minute blood flow blockage of the right arm (RA) brachial artery (BA) using a blood pressure cuff inflator. This procedure is usually done for the assessment of endothelial dysfunction which is a risk factor for developing CVD. In this study, signals of the infrared (IR) and red (R) LED's of the PPG sensor were analyzed. These signals were preprocessed, normalized and slow varying component of the signal (DC values) and the pulsatile... 

In this paper, system identification techniques are applied to accurately characterize the frequency behavior of a commercially available but with unknown characteristics of a photoplethysmography (under the commercial name of Pulse Sensor). Although claimed to be open-source, the electronic schematic of this device does not allow for a full characterization of it. Therefore a second order auto-regressive with exogenous input model has been employed to find the frequency response of this system. An optical excitation circuit was developed to send a pseudo-random signal to the Pulse Sensor. Results show that the model is able to reproduce the output with a fitness of 89.7 %. The obtained... 

The feasibility of a novel system to reliably estimate the normalized central blood pressure (CBPN) from the radial photoplethysmogram (PPG) is investigated. Right-wrist radial blood pressure and left-wrist PPG were simultaneously recorded in five different days. An industry-standard applanation tonometer was employed for recording radial blood pressure. The CBP waveform was amplitude-normalized to determine CBPN. A total of fifteen second-order autoregressive models with exogenous input were investigated using system identification techniques. Among these 15 models, the model producing the lowest coefficient of variation (CV) of the fitness during the five days was... 

Dyslipidemia is considered to be one of the main heart risk factors, affecting the endothelial vascular function, which can be non-invasively investigated by ultrasound flow-mediated dilation (US-FMD). However, US-FMD comes at a high-cost and is operator-dependent. In this paper, the effect of dyslipidemia on the photoplethysmogram (PPG) signal recorded from collateral index fingers is investigated following a previous study where it was shown that results similar to that of US-FMD can be replicated by the PPG. Two groups, consisting of 30 healthy subjects free from any risk factors and 30 subjects who have only dyslipidemia as risk factor were respectively considered. The percent change in... 

The management of transformers' capacity is a vital task for planners and asset managers due to their high cost. This paper proposes an optimization model for capacity management of transformers in a substation over long-run. The model considers the present worth costs of investment, losses, maintenance, reliability, and the salvage value of transformers for providing the optimal selection and scheduling of multistage transformer installations and their refurbishments. In the optimization model, growing failure rate of transformers along with their age is incorporated and the cumulative loss-of-life (LOL) of transformers is also used in determining their salvage value. The developed model is... 

We consider a cellular wireless system including several interfering multi-user multi-antenna uplink channels, where the base station of each cell has to locally recover the messages of its corresponding users. We use a linear Wyner model, where each base station experiences interference only from the users in the two neighboring cells. Each base station is connected to the two nearby base stations through a backhaul link. The objective is to achieve the maximum degrees of freedom per cell, with minimum aggregated load in the backhaul. We propose a successive cooperative alignment scheme, in which each base station forms backhaul messages by combining the previous received backhaul messages... 

Noninvasive measurement of brachial artery (BA) flow mediated dilation (FMD), commonly measured by high resolution ultrasonography, has provided a non-invasive means for the evaluation of endothelial function. Recently, another technique based on finger photopletysmogram (PPG) analysis has been proposed by the authors. In this paper, simultaneous measurement of BA FMD and PPG signals data from 86 human subjects (43 healthy and 43 risk) is analyzed and a statistical model is proposed to estimate the BA FMD based on PPG signals, the BA diameter at baseline as well as other demographics factors such as age and gender. Linear regression by multivariate analysis was conducted to obtain the... 

We consider a wireless distributed computing system, in which multiple mobile users, connected wirelessly through an access point, collaborate to perform a computation task. In particular, users communicate with each other via the access point to exchange their locally computed intermediate computation results, which is known as data shuffling. We propose a scalable framework for this system, in which the required communication bandwidth for data shuffling does not increase with the number of users in the network. The key idea is to utilize a particular repetitive pattern of placing the data set (thus a particular repetitive pattern of intermediate computations), in order to provide the... 

How can we optimally trade extra computing power to reduce the communication load in distributed computing? We answer this question by characterizing a fundamental tradeoff between computation and communication in distributed computing, i.e., the two are inversely proportional to each other. More specifically, a general distributed computing framework, motivated by commonly used structures like MapReduce, is considered, where the overall computation is decomposed into computing a set of “Map” and “Reduce” functions distributedly across multiple computing nodes. A coded scheme, named “Coded Distributed Computing” (CDC), is proposed to demonstrate that increasing the computation load of the... 

We consider a K-user Interference Channel where each transmitter is interested in conveying a message to its corresponding receiver. In addition, we assume a fully connected noiseless backhaul network through which receivers can collaborate and help each other recover their desired messages. In this paper, we fully characterize the trade-off between the rate in wireless link (per user) in terms of degrees of freedom (DoF) versus backhaul load (per user) for large values of K. In particular, we characterize the optimal trade-off for all values of K, where K is an even number. For odd values of K, we characterize the trade-off within a gap of 2(k - 1)/k(k + 1), which goes to zero as K...