Breast cancer is one of the leading reason of death among women. Nevertheless, medications for this fatal disease are still away of ambitions. Patients (thought to have breast cancer) should go through several advanced medical diagnostic procedures like mammography, biopsy analysis, ultrasound imaging, etc. Mammography is one of the medical imaging techniques used for detecting breast cancer. However, its resulted images may not be clear enough or helpful for physician to diagnose each case correctly. This fact has pushed researchers towards developing effective ways to enhance images throughout using various enhancement algorithms. In this paper, a comparison amongst these applied algorithms was done to evaluate the optimum enhancement technique. A morphology enhancement, which is resulted from combining top-hat operation and bottom-hat operation, was used as a proposed enhancement algorithm. The proposed enhancement algorithm was compared to three other well-known enhancement algorithms, specifically histogram equalization, logarithmic transform, and gamma correction with different gamma values. Twenty-five mammographic images were taken from the mammography image analysis society (MIAS) database samples. The minimum entropy difference value (EDV) was used as metric to evaluate the best enhancement algorithm. Results has approved that the proposed enhancement algorithm gave the best-enhanced images in comparison to the aforementioned algorithms.

Monitoring the heart activities for old people or people with medical history (Arrhythmia or CHD) is targeted by most new medical technologies. This paper demonstrated an in-patient real-time monitoring system for heart rate estimation. A ratio of beats per minute (BPM) is continuously recorded, streamed and archived to the cloud via WeMos WiFi development board. This cost effective system is simply based on two sub-systems: BPM data acquisition through pulse sensor and WeMos-based communication systems. The streamed BPM data are saved instantaneously in Google drive as spreadsheets which can only be accessed by authorized persons wherever the internet service is available. Thus, the person in charge can remotely observe the patient's status and do analytics for the archived data. A pilot study with eight subjects was carried out to validate the developed BPM tele-monitoring system. Encouraging results have been achieved.

Medications are vital for patients and especially for those who are receiving treatment in hospitals. Providing medications for these people is essential to maintain their health. On the other hand, medication dispensing error is one of the most common challenges that face clinical pharmacists and medical staff. These errors frequently occurred due to poor medication systems and/or human factors (i.e. environmental conditions, fatigue or staff shortage). These factors may affect prescribing, transcribing, administration, dispensing and monitoring practices which can result in disability, severe harm and even death. Avoiding medication dispensing errors is the key motivation of this paper. Consequently, a biometric-based dispensing system has been designed and implemented. The system can be installed at hospital wards and used for delivering and monitoring inpatients doses. It consists of three parts; hardware, software and mechanical part. Three 4-phase stepper motors are used for controlling the mechanical part of this system. An optical fingerprint sensor is used which is compatible with the ESP32 low-power SoC for scanning patients’ fingerprints to recognize and store their data. The system directly updates its database whenever is used by the inpatients, so that nobody can get additional doses. This system is cost-effective, reliable and easy to use.

Human machine interaction (HMI) allows persons to control and interact with devices. Starting from elementary apparatus which acquires input bio-signals to controlling various applications. Medical applications are amongst the very important applications of HMI. One of these medical applications is assisting fully/partially paralyzed patients to restore movements or freely move using exoskeletons or motorized wheelchairs. Helping patients with spinal cord injury or serious neurological diseases to restore their movements is a key role objective for most researchers in this field. In this paper, an EEG-based HMI system is proposed to assist patients with tetraplegia/quadriplegia to mentally control a motorized wheelchair so they can move freely and independently. EEG power spectrum (α, β, δ, θ, and γ) from the frontal lobe of brain is recorded, filtered and wirelessly sent to the wheelchair to control directions and engine status. Four different experiments were conducted using the proposed system in order to validate the performance. Two different GUIs scenarios (cross-shaped and horizontal bar) were used with the experiments. Results showed that the horizontal bar scenario considered more user friendly while the cross-shaped is the more suitable for navigation. The implemented system can be equipped with modules and sensors such as GPS, ultrasound and accelerometer that improve the system performance and reliability.

AbstractIntroductionChronic obstructive pulmonary diseases are the most common disease worldwide. Asthma and sleep apnea are the most prevalent of pulmonary diseases. Patients with such chronic diseases require special care and continuous monitoring to avoid any respiratory deterioration. Therefore, the development of a dedicated and reliable sensor with the aid of modern technologies for measuring and monitoring respiratory parameters is very necessary nowadays.ObjectiveThis study aims to develop a small and cost-effective respiratory rate sensor.MethodsA microcontroller and communication technology (NodeMCU) with the ThingSpeak platform is used in the proposed system to view and process the respiratory rate data every 60 s. The total current consumption of the proposed sensor is about 120 mA. Four able-bodied participants were recruited to test and validate the developed system.ResultsThe results show that the developed sensor and the proposed system can be used to measure and monitor the respiratory rate.ConclusionsThe demonstrated system showed applicable, repeatable, and acceptable results.