Recent a few decades, the microtechnology has been progressed so rapidly and applied in diverse areas. Especially, this technology was focused on the field of biotechnology and medicine because of its size and simple fabrication process. In this paper, the current status of microtechnology is briefly introduced from the aspect of material, process and device and the application of this technology in biotechnology and medicine is also described. The microtechnology will be more broadly applied in future in the biotechnology and medicine area and the biomedical engineer should have continuous interests in this technology.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the motor recovery in 4 chronic hemiparetic patients with Fugl-Meyer (FM) and EMG characteristics before and after the training program. The training was performed at 1hr/day, 5days/week during 6 weeks in 4 chronic stroke patients. Electromyographic activities of the affected hand were recorded during isometric wrist flexion/ extension movements. In all patients, FM was significantly improved after the 6-week training. Onset/offset delay of muscle contraction significantly decreased in the affected wrist after the training. The co-contraction ratio of flexor/extensor muscles decreased significantly. Also, onset/offset delay of muscle contraction and co-contraction ratio correlates significantly with upper limb motor impairment and motor recovery. This EMG technique allows an objective evaluation of changes in muscle activity in post-stroke patients, providing easily measurable, quantitative indices of muscle characteristics.

The aim of this paper is to report our preliminary results of investigating the spatial focalization of Zen-meditation EEG (electroencephalograph) in alpha band (8-13 Hz). For comparison, the study involved two groups of subjects, practitioners (experimental group) and non-practitioners (control group). To extract EEG alpha rhythm, wavelet analysis was applied to multi-channel EEG signals. Normalized alpha-power vectors were then constructed from spatial distribution of alpha powers, that were classified by Fuzzy C-means based algorithm to explore various brain spatial characteristics during meditation (or, at rest). Optimal number of clusters was determined by correlation coefficients of the membership-value vectors of each cluster center. Our results show that, in the experimental group, the incidence of frontal alpha activity varied in accordance with the meditation stage. The results demonstrated three different spatiotemporal modules consisting with three distinctive meditation stages normally recognized by meditation practitioners. The frontal alpha activity in two groups decreased in different ways. Particularly, monotonic decline was observed in the control group, and the experimental group showed increasing results. The phenomenon might imply various mechanisms employed by meditation and relaxation in modulating parietal alpha.

It is well known that temporal information, i.e speech onset, about input speech can be represented to the response nerve signal of auditory nerve better depending on the adaptation effect occurred in the auditory nerve synapse. In addition, the performance of a speech processor of cochlear implant can be improved by the adaptation effect. In this paper, we observed the emphasis characteristic of speech onset in the recently proposed adaptation algorithm, analyzed the characteristic of performance change according to the variation of parameters and compared with transient emphasis spectral maxima (TESM) is the previous typical strategy. When observing false peaks which are generated everywhere except speech onset, in the case of the proposed model, the false peak were generated much less than in the case of the TESM and it is more distinguishable under noise.

This paper reports on a realtime OS based master-slave configuration robot control system for laparoscopic surgery robot which enables telesurgery and overcomes shortcomings with conventional laparoscopic surgery. Surgery robot system requires control system that can process large volume information such as medical image data and video signal from endoscope in real-time manner, as well as precisely control the robot with high reliability. To meet the complex requirements, the use of high-level real-time OS (Operating System) in surgery robot controller is a must, which is as common as in many of modem robot controllers that adopt real-time OS as a base system software on which specific functional modules are implemened for more reliable and stable system. The control system consists of joint controllers, host controllers, and user interface units. The robot features a compact slave robot with 5 DOF (Degree-Of-Freedom) expanding the workspace of each tool and increasing the number of tools operating simultaneously. Each master, slave and Gill (Graphical User Interface) host runs a dedicated RTOS (Real-time OS), RTLinux-Pro (FSMLabs Inc., U.S.A.) on which functional modules such as motion control, communication, video signal integration and etc, are implemented, and all the hosts are in a gigabit Ethernet network for inter-host communication. Each master and slave controller set has a dedicated CAN (Controller Area Network) channel for control and monitoring signal communication with the joint controllers. Total 4 pairs of the master/slave manipulators as current are controlled by one host controller. The system showed satisfactory performance in both position control precision and master-slave motion synchronization in both bench test and animal experiment, and is now under further development for better safety and control fidelity for clinically applicable prototype.

Therapeutic ultrasound which is developed for rehabilitation therapy have already been used for healing joint contracture, synechia, acute and chronic inflammatory diseases. Medical devices for pain-relief and healing using therapeutic ultrasound are actively being developed. This study measured the change of PTT with the transmitted ultrasound through the human body to find out the increase of compliance of blood vessels. Measurement method of PTT in this study is employed as useful ways to acquire physiological information of patients in the clinical case in order to measure the change of mechanical characteristics of blood vessels. This study confirmed the PTT change of rehabilitation patients through the thermal effects of ultrasound by using PTT and also found that it is possible to increase PTT by adjusting the warm water and ultrasound. The increase of PTT means the decrease of the pulse wave velocity from the cardiovascular system to the peripheral arteries. The physiological effects occurred using the warm water and ultrasound.

We describe a backprojection filtering method for limited angle tomography. In order to reduce blur artifacts originated from the out-of-planes and control high-frequency noise, we employed two band-limited window functions, and which were realized by Hann filters in this study. Based on the experimentally measured data, the performance of the developed method is demonstrated by comparing with the conventional shift-and-add and filtered backprojection methods. Application of the developed method to the dental imaging has a potential to be used for the preoperative evaluation of the jaw for dental implants with much reduced patient dose instead of the conventional dental computed tomography.

The object of this study is to investigate the effects of intermittent cyclic stretching on the smooth muscle cells (SMCs) seeded onto aligned multi-layered fibrous scaffold. To make multi-layered fibrous scaffold, polyurethane (PU) and poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) were electrospun alternatively, then were immersed into distilled water to extract PEO. Various types of scaffolds were fabricated depending on fiber directions, i.e., aligned or randomly oriented. The direction of stretching was either parallel or vertical to the fiber direction for the aligned scaffolds. The stretching was also applied to the randomly aligned scaffolds. The duration of stretching was 2 min with 15 min resting period. During the stretching, the maximum and minimum strain was adjusted to be 10 and 7%, respectively with the frequency of 1 Hz. The bioactivities of cells on the scaffolds were assessed by quantifying DNA, collagen, and glycosaminoglycan (GAG) levels. And the cell morphology was observed by staining F-actin. SMCs under parallel stretching to the fiber direction responded more positively than those in other conditions. From the results, we could explain the morphological effect of a substrate on cellular activities. In addition the synergistic effects of substrate and mechanical stimuli effects were confirmed.

Nowadays, implantable hearing aids have been developed to solve the problems of conventional hearing aids. In case of fully implantable hearing aids, an implantable microphone is necessary to receive sound signal beneath the skin. Normally, an implantable microphone has poor frequency response characteristics in high frequency bands of acoustic signal due to the high frequency attenuation effect of skin after implantation to human body. In this paper, the implantable microphone is designed to reduce the high frequency attenuation effect of a skin by putting its resonance frequency at the attenuated range through a finite element analysis (FEA) simulation. The designed implantable microphone through the simulated results has been fabricated by manufacturing process using bio-compatible materials. By the several in-vitro experiments with pig skin, it has been verified that the designed implantable microphone has a resonance frequency around the starting part of the attenuated range and reduces the attenuation effect.

The major risk associated with the use of automated power injectors is the well known complication of contrast material extravasation at the injection site. Automated injection of computed tomography (CT) contrast media can produce the compartment syndrome. The purpose of this study was to assess the ability of this device during clinically important episodes of extravasation. The extravasation detection accessory (EDA) system was composed of a strain gage, an amplifier and a computer based system. A strain gage pliable adhesive patch was applied to the skin aver the intravenous catheter and the catheter was connected to the power injector with a cable to monitor the resolution data. If the programmed monitoring, which was developed with MS Visual C++, at the extravasation occurred, then the injection was interrupted the auto injector. CT was used to demonstrate the clinically important extravasation. This study was a prospective, observational study in which the EDA system was used to monitor the automated mechanical injection of contrast material in 7 dogs. There were two true-positive cases (range of extravasation volumes: $18{\sim}22ml$), twenty three true-negative cases, three false-positive cases and no false-negative cases. The EDA system had a sensitivity of 100% and a specificity of 88% for the detection of clinically important extravasation. The EDA system had good sensitivity for the detection of clinically important extravasation and the EDA system has the clinical potential for the early detection of extravasation of the contrast medium that is administered with power injectors. The EDA system is easy to use safe and accurate for the monitoring extravasation of the intravenous injections, and this system may prove especially useful in CT applications.

The purpose of this study is to observe the brain activity patterns during visual oddball tasks with two difficulty levels by the analysis of high-density event-related potential (ERP). Along with conventional statistical analysis of averaged ERP waveforms, we applied independent component analysis (ICA) for the individual, single-trial analysis and verified its effectiveness. We could identify multiple ERP components such as early visual components (P1, N1), and two components which seem to be important task-related components and showed difficulty-dependent variability (P2, P300). The P2 was found around central region at $180{\sim}220ms$, and the P300 was found globally at $300{\sim}500ms$ poststimulus. As the task became difficult, the P2 amplitude increased, and the P300 amplitude decreased. After single-trial ERPs were decomposed into multiple independent components (ICs), several ICs resulting from P2 and P300 sources were identified. These ICs were projected onto scalp electrodes and the projected ICs were statistically compared according to two task difficulties. For most subjects, the results obtained from single-trial/individual analysis using ICA gave the tendencies of amplitude change that are similar to the averaged ERP analysis for most subjects. The temporal pattern and number of ICs corresponding to ${\mu}$ rhythm was not dependent on the task difficulty. It seems that the motor response was not affected by the task difficulty.

In this paper, the study was carried out to design and implement the medical compound stimulator based on the preexisting individual medical stimulators with Low frequency, High frequency and cooling stimulation. The proposed equipment is designed to compound all the functions including a cooling stimulation with a range of $0{\sim}20^{\circ}C$ and the verified low and high frequencies of 250Hz, 500Hz, 1KHz and 1MHz respectively from the previous clinical experiment with a consideration of its credibility and efficiency. Also, it was constructed by using a new technique, thermoelectricity semiconductor with a consideration of miniaturization and stability. In accordance with patients' treatment purpose, the hand piece of low frequency/cooling stimulation and High frequency/cooling stimulation were separately designed for convenience. The frequency, accuracy and other factors of implemented medical compound stimulator was satisfied according to its measurement. It was also tested by Korean Testing Laboratory (KTL) for its stability and efficacy and it confirmed that the medical compound stimulator is suitable for use as it fits in with the medical equipment standards.