Computers and Electrical Engineering 39 (2013) 7778

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

Computers and Electrical Engineering

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/compeleceng

Guest Editorial

Introduction to the Special Issue on Bio-engineering

The eld of bio-engineering has been advancing at a rapid and exciting pace in this information age, as information technology progress continually provides new products and methods to enable researchers to approach problems in biology, medicine and health in ever-increasing new ways and capabilities. For one thing, nowadays a vast amount of bio-information can be extracted from living organisms and powerful analysis tools can be used to help study various life phenomena, design more effective medicine and improve public health. On the other hand, these life science problems currently also provide a new frontier for researchers in traditional disciplines such as physics, mathematics and engineering, as they try to apply necessary methods and techniques and develop new ones toward the same goals. This special issue of seven papers is focused on new engineering methods and designs both in hardware and software that will likely improve the ease and accuracy of acquisition, analysis and storage of bio-information. Emphasis is on the practical signicance for rapid deployment rather than the novelty of theoretical methodology. It is hoped that researchers in various disciplines will benet by better understanding both the new methods and tools and problems at hand in bio-engineering. The papers are organized as follows. The rst paper is entitled Generation Scheduling Problem by Intelligent Genetic Algorithm by Dhanalakshmi Sundararajan, Baskar Subramanian, Kannan Subramanian, and Mahadevan Krishnan. It presents a Genetic Algorithm solution with an intelligent coding scheme to handle minimum up/down time constraints of the Generation Scheduling problem. A penalty parameter-less constraint handling technique is used to satisfy the power balance constraint. The result is compared with those reported using other methods. The second paper is A Novel Kernel-based Limited-View Computerized Tomography Reconstruction via Anisotropic Diffusion| by Jun Feng, Jian-Zhou Zhang, and Bin Zhou. It proposes a new efcient method for limited-view CT reconstruction, which promises the same results at reduced radiation exposure. In this method, the Feldkamp-Davis-Kress (FDK) inverse kernel is rst derived and then modied to arrive at a compact FDK kernel. Then it carries out an adaptive anisotropic diffusion process for reconstruction while suppressing the artifacts and noise. The third paper is entitled Noninvasive Cufess Blood Pressure Estimation Using Pulse Transit Time and Hilbert-Huang Transform by Younhee Choi, Qiao Zhang, and Seokbum Ko. It proposes a non-invasive cufess method for blood pressure measurement toward common home use. It employs the correlation between the blood pressure and the pulse transit time (PPT) and introduces the Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) to accurately nd such correlation. A multi-innovation least squares method and the calibration process are discussed for parameter update. The fourth paper is Optimization Algorithms for the Design of Digital Microuidic Biochips: A Survey by Indrajit Pan, Ritwik Mukherjee, Hazur Rahaman, Tuhina Samanta, and Parthasarathi Dasgupta. It provides a comprehensive survey on the optimization techniques in the design automation process of digital microuidic biochips and suggests possible future research directions to further improve the medical diagnosis process. The fth paper is GPU-Friendly Gallbladder Modeling in Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy Surgical Training System by Jing Zhang, Wei Min Huang, Jia Yin Zhou, Jing Qin, Tao Yang, Jiang Liu, Yi Su, Chee Kong Chui, and Stephen Kin Yong Chang. It proposes a multi-layered mass-spring model for fast and accurate deformable gallbladder modeling, which plays an important part in virtual-reality-based laparoscopic cholecystectomy simulations. Such a model is designed for fast GPU implementation, and preliminary results are presented. The sixth paper is Beta Wavelet Based ECG Signal Compression using Lossless Encoding with Modied Thresholding by Ranjeet Kumar, A. Kumar, and Rajesh Pandey. It deals with the issue of data compression for ECG signals. In the proposed method, a beta wavelet family is rst employed to decompose the given signal, followed by a thresholding process that treats each decomposition level separately. Then the run length encoding is applied to further compress the truncated small values. The nal paper is entitled A New AC-Coupled Amplier for Portable ECG without Reference Electrode by Ching-Sung Wang. It proposes a new AC-coupled amplier design without reference electrode. It provides a simpler bio-potential

0045-7906/$ - see front matter 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compeleceng.2012.12.008

78

Guest Editorial / Computers and Electrical Engineering 39 (2013) 7778

amplier circuit structure with good performance in terms of gain and common mode rejection ratio (CMRR). It has the potential to be employed in various bio-potential measurement devices such as portable ECG devices. The guest editor wishes to thank all the authors for their devoted contribution to this special issue and the reviewers for their time and effort to further improve the quality of the selected papers. Special thanks are also due to the Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Manu Malek, and the journal editorial staff for their support and help to make this special issue possible. Guest editors Yi Wan Lanzhou University, China E-mail address: wanyi@lzu.edu.cn

Yi Wan received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University, USA. He is currently a professor at the School of Information Science and Engineering, Lanzhou University, China. His research interests include signal processing, computer graphics, bio-engineering and wireless communications.