Health challenges remain one of the long-standing issues in the Arab region but biomedical computing research is one way to tackle these challenges.Ěý

By Dr. Ahsan H. Khandoker

Read Arabic storyĚý.

A combination of factors is driving the growth in demand for healthcare in the Middle East, including aging populations, longer life expectancies, and sedentary lifestyles that lead to an increase in obesity, cancer, and diabetes.

Thanks to recent advances in computing technology, biomedical computing has become one of the most influential research areas worldwide. There has been an explosion in the volume of biomedical data generated by the technologies involved in modern healthcare, but these volumes of data pose great analytical challenges in the quest to infer the knowledge buried within.

Researchers across the Arab region have successfully advanced a diverse spectrum of biomedical computing applications, as well as stimulating commercial interest. In an article published in, a journal for the Association of Computing Machinery, my colleagues and I shed light on these notable research efforts and demonstrate how this research addresses healthcare issues in the region. We focus on three main areas of biomedical computing: biomedical imaging, biomedical signal analysis, and bioinformatics.

Biomedical image analysis has been used extensively in the Arab world due to the region’s strong prevalence of diseases that rely on imaging techniques for accurate diagnosis. Across the region, numerous research groups have published work in this area, using various machine learning techniques. Research includes localization of cardiac structures using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computer-aided diagnosis for understanding tumor behavior, and diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease using diffusion tensor images. With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, many researchers have also proposed methods for fast and accurate CT image segmentation, which is crucial to the diagnosis of Covid-19.

Biomedical signal analysis is another area that is key, given the advances in the technology of recording different physiological signals from the human body. These signals can be used in diagnosing various diseases as well as modulating the function of different organs. The Khalifa University Biomedical Signal Processing research group is developing non-invasive fetal phonocardiogram, as well as adult electrocardiogram (ECG) signal processing techniques to prevent stillbirths and sudden cardiac deaths.

Cardiovascular disease represents a leading cause of death in the Arab region, as well as worldwide, and the KU team is proud to contribute to the global research efforts to diagnose and predict cardiac arrhythmia complications. The team has developed a new device presenting a novel algorithm to predict a heart attack long before its onset, and successfully developed the first proof-of-concept, low-cost phonocardiogram sensor that can detect fetal heart sounds and give a reliable estimation of the fetal heart rate and its variability.

Brain signal analysis is another notable research direction pursued in biomedical computing applications. Researchers have identified and characterized the brain networks associated with cognitive deficits in patients, with neurological pathologies such as Alzheimer’s disease understood to be caused by alterations in these brain networks. This research could complement current Alzheimer’s Disease diagnostic metrics, especially at early stages of the disease.

Another study has proposed a technique to assess the mental capacity to preserve attention for long durations, with the technique able to monitor changes in the communication patterns among different brain regions with reduced attention. Biomedical signal analysis research in the region has resulted in influential and diverse contributions that aim to resolve multiple technical challenges in the field and address several population health issues.

Researchers in the field of bioinformatics have leveraged high-performance computational methods to tackle hereditary diseases prevalent in the region. There have been multiple efforts to develop national genome programs, with the projects focusing on unravelling the mutations responsible for inherited disorders in the population. The Emirati project, for example, has characterized 1,000 individual genomes with aspirations to eventually cover the entire population of the country. This bioinformatics research has the potential to dramatically enhance the quality of life of millions of people around the Arab region.

Built upon the success demonstrated in different biomedical computing tracks, the Arab region has witnessed a strong momentum for entrepreneurial activities in many sectors, for example, the work of the KU Biomedical Signal Processing research group that resulted in a UAE-based start-up company licensed to commercialize their phonogram technology for fetal wellbeing at home, called Medical Advanced Research Project (MARP ).

Research in biomedical computing is stimulating the budding culture of entrepreneurship and new ventures across the region, opening avenues of development that could magnify the outcomes of the biomedical computing research community in the region. Much of this work is being undertaken by Khalifa University’s Healthcare Engineering Innovation Group (HEIG) and Biotechnology Center (BTC).

Dr. Ahsan H. Khandoker is an Associate Professor of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Khalifa University.Ěý

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• Photo caption: This block of 160GHZ Radar (LNA, PA, Mixer) design at 22nm technology and will be used for future Radar-based vital sign detector

In these unprecedented times, healthcare innovations designed to manage and reduce the spread of infectious diseases like Covid-19 are paramount. Researchers at the Khalifa University System-on-Chip Lab (SoCL) recently published a on using radar to detect human vital signs without contact. While their initial motivation was focused on removing the need for wires and electrodes to manage patient health better, it has since evolved to find applications of this new technology to help limit the spread of Covid-19.

“Our proposed novel radar-based vital sign detection system has great potential in monitoring crowds or groups of passengers from a distance,” explained Dr. Baker Mohammad, Associate Professor of Electronic Engineering and SoC Lab Director. “We have demonstrated the technology using the SoC lab equipment, and we’re now working on integrating this solution for use in a general setting.”

Continuous monitoring of vital signs plays a crucial role in early detection and even prediction of conditions that may affect the wellbeing of the patient. Conventional clinical methods of detecting theses signs require the use of contact sensors, which may not be practical for long duration monitoring and less convenient for repeated measurements. Outside a clinical setting, for example on public transport or in building lobbies, it’s plausible to track body temperature in a relatively simple, low cost manner, but for heart rate monitoring, it would be impossible to attach electrodes to each subject.

“The four major vital signs are body temperature, heart rate, breath rate, and blood pressure,” explained Dr. Mohammad. “They provide almost a complete picture of individuals’ body vital functions and help to assess their general physical health. Any abnormality to the standard cardio-pulmonary rates, heart rate, breath rate and blood pressure, may indicate a sign of physical or mental stress.”

Early symptoms for Covid-19 include shortness of breath, fever, and coughing. Detection and monitoring of breath rate and heart rate usually require complex systems involving sensors and computers that are physically connected. Dr. Mohammad and his team investigated the use of radars to measure these vital signs from a distance.

“Doppler Continuous-Wave (CW) radars have been used for cardio-respiratory signal sensing since 1975,” said Dr. Mohammad. “Since then, a lot of research activities have been undertaken to improve performance. Multi-target vital sign detection is possible using Doppler radars. However, real-world application of vital signs detection radars are not without difficulties.”

CW radars face numerous challenges during the detection of heart and respiration rates. Some of these technical challenges can be mitigated by increasing the complexity and power consumption of the radars, and with more sophisticated signal processing techniques, but some are more simple problems, but with difficult solutions. No matter how powerful the tool, it can’t stop a patient moving around.

“During the acquisition of the vital signs, the subject may move body parts like hands and legs, or even their entire body,” explained Dr. Mohammad. “These unwanted body movements are called random body movements, and the signals reflected by these are stronger than those from the vital signals, which corrupts the data. Mitigating this is therefore a major challenge.”

Another difficulty to overcome is the issue of one vital signal drowning out another.

“The ability of the radar to detect a precise and accurate heart signal is challenging,” said Dr. Mohammad. “The frequency of the human heartbeat lies close to that of the respiration, but since the heartbeat signal is much smaller in amplitude compared to the respiration signal, it can easily be corrupted by the harmonics of the latter. Therefore, adequate measures are needed to recover the heartbeat signals.”

To demonstrate the potential of Doppler radars in vital signs detection, the research team conducted a proof-of-concept experiment. They found that even though radars show promising results in detecting human cardio-respiratory rates, the issues of random body movements and separating heartrate from breath rate remain bottleneck problems that need to be solved before this system can become widespread.

“Future work needs to focus on vital sign radars to allow their proliferation in the consumer market,” said Dr. Mohammad. “This research will include more accurate mechanisms for mitigating issues like random body movements and reducing the computational loads for vital signs acquisitions. However, Doppler radars show promising results and have great potential.”

In situations where slowing the spread of disease like Covid-19 is crucial, being able to quickly and easily monitor vital signs could allow life to continue more normally. If everyone in an area could be assessed for healthy vital signs, anyone showing symptoms could be much more easily identified and isolated from the healthy population. The early symptoms of Covid-19 are similar to those of the seasonal flu, so technologies such as radar techniques could be helpful far beyond the current situation.

“To further improve the contactless vital signs detection accuracy, the SoCL team is currently working on implementing the radar at millimetre-wave frequencies,” added Dr. Mohammad. “One project focuses on designing a frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar at 160 GHz with 10 GHz bandwidth. Moving to higher frequencies enables higher heart rate detection accuracy since the Doppler resolution is proportional to the carrier frequency. Furthermore, the FMCW radar has the capability to detect the vital signs of multiple subjects located at different ranges with a resolution of about 1.5 cm.

“This feature could help monitor, for example, the vital signs of students in a classroom or passengers in airplane. Moreover, the FMCW radar system will be compact with small size and low power consumption thanks to the use of the 22 nm SOI CMOS technology from GlobalFoundries. The maximum power emitted is 10 dBm, which falls far below the average power emitted by a smart phone. Therefore, the vital signs radar is completely safe for human body tissue.”

Jade Sterling
News and Features Writer
30 March 2020

The post Going Contactless: Using Radar to Detect Human Vital Signs appeared first on Khalifa University.

KU Researchers Develop Lymph Node-on-Chip Device on Which to Test New Drugs and Accelerate Development of Effective Pharmaceuticals

Ever since life started, people have been in constant battle with disease. New drugs are introduced to combat pathogens and disease-causing agents, but getting regulatory approval is not easy; it is time consuming, costly and highly dependent on animal models.

For a drug to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), it must pass the preclinical evaluation phase — involving in vitro testing as well as in vivo animal testing — and then the clinical evaluation phase which requires controlled drug administration on human subjects. Developing new drugs is a lengthy and expensive process, sometimes taking decades and costing upwards of USD1.7 billion. Unfortunately, many promising medications fail during clinical evaluations, mainly due to a lack of understanding of immunotoxicity – how these foreign substances interact with the human immune system.

The immune system’s main function is to protect the body from diseases through the recognition and clearance of pathogens (viruses and bacteria) and infected or cancerous cells. The corollary is the recognition of self- and environmental antigens (food, airborne particles, etc.) as non-harmful: this is immune-tolerance. In a perfect world, the immune system performs these two roles perfectly: immune homeostasis. But when the immune system is overwhelmed, infections and diseases can occur. On the other hand, poor immune tolerance can be translated into allergic reaction or auto-immune disease. The immune system is extremely complex and being able to predict how a proposed drug may affect the immune system would translate to better performance during clinical trials.

Aya Zaki Shanti, MSc by Research in Engineering student, with support from Dr. Cesare Stefanini, Director of the Healthcare Engineering Innovation Group, and Dr. Jeremy Teo, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at New York University-Abu Dhabi, has developed a platform to help predict and filter out poor drug candidates at an early stage in drug development and guarantee better performance during clinical trials, ultimately helping to bring more effective medications to the market.

“In the development of novel pharmaceutics and cell-mediated therapeutics, the immune system has to be carefully considered as part of the response mechanism or as a potential collateral for drug toxicity,” explained Shanti. “To reduce the attrition of such developments, the interaction of immune cells with drugs and/or with other cell types should be mechanistically investigated.

“As the lymph node is the integrating center for immune cells, whereby the body invokes immune responses against foreign substances, it is an ideal site for the study of drug interaction with biological components.”

Lymph nodes are widely present throughout the body and are linked by the lymphatic vessels as a part of the circulatory system. They act as filters for foreign particles and cancer cells, and contain lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell, which includes B cells and T cells. B cells produce antibodies, which circulate throughout the bloodstream, bind to a predetermined antigen, and stimulate an immune response. T cells control and shape the immune response by providing a variety of functions including immune-mediated cell death. The B cells identify the target; the T cells swoop in and respond.

The technology developed by Shanti is a lab-on-chip device that recreates the human lymph node and allows investigation into cell-to-cell interactions and downstream immunological responses. Using this platform, information can be gleaned about the likely immunotoxicity of newly developed drugs.

“We have developed a novel microfluidic platform replicating the lymph node microenvironment to facilitate biological investigations of immune cellular kinetics, cell-to-cell interactions, and sampling,” said Shanti. “We recreated the biological scaffold and reintroduced the cellular residents in an in vivo-like distribution into the device.”

Current drug development practices lack the reliable and sensitive techniques required to evaluate the immunotoxicity of drug candidates, and organ-on-chip devices have emerged as key tools to aid in this in a physiologically relevant manner. But the recreation of a lymph node in vitro is not an easy task, primarily because of its complex architecture and internal structure.

“Our lymph node-on-chip incorporates key features of the human lymph node, namely the compartmentalization of immune cells within distinct structural domains and the replication of lymphatic fluid flow pattern,” explained Shanti. “Our device supports 3D cell culture in biomimetic matrices and sustains high rates of cell viability over the typical timeframe of immunotoxicity experiments.”

While lymph node-on-chip devices already exist, few have been used to assess the lymph node’s ability to identify pathogens and fight infections, which is of vital importance to drug development.

“The ultimate goal of this platform is to enable investigations into the effects of pharmaceutics to downstream immunology in a more physiologically relevant microenvironment,” explained Shanti. “Thus, contributing to increased safety, lowered cost, and shorter cycles for drug development.”

Shanti published a in Pharmaceutics in December 2018. Her work is helping shape drug development practice in evaluating the immunotoxicity of drug candidates and contributing to reducing the current high attrition rate in clinical trials.

A patent has been filed for Shanti’s lymph node-on-chip and the project has been awarded the Abu Dhabi Technology Innovation Pioneers Healthcare Award 2018, with the paper winning Best Paper (Engineering) at the UAE Graduate Research Conference 2019 held at Zayed University.

Jade Sterling
News and Features Writer
28 August 2019

The post Engineering an Artificial Biomimetic Lymph Node to Improve Drug Development appeared first on Khalifa University.

The Healthcare Engineering Innovation Group (HEIG) hosted its 1st International workshop from 25 – 26 November 2019.

The HEIG seeks to develop novel methodologies, devices, and tools for the diagnosis, intervention, treatment, and rehabilitation of the wide spectrum of health challenges associated with cardiovascular diseases. The group also has the framework to tackle other relevant health challenges in the UAE.

The HEIG workshop focused on the themes of vision on healthcare, innovation, and value creation.

The workshop offered a unique opportunity for local and international researchers and healthcare professionals to address challenges related to healthcare innovation, with a particular focus on cardiovascular diseases.

Highly qualified local and international institutions participated, including representatives from SEHA, the Department of Health, Mubadala, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, University of Limerick (Ireland), The BioRobotics Institute (Sculoa Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy), Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), New York University Abu Dhabi, Medical Micro Instruments (MMI, Italy), University Of Applied Sciences (Germany), Polytechnic of Milan (Italy), Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences, and American University of Sharjah.

The researchers presented their projects, achievements, and latest research findings on issues related to patient needs, clinical challenges in terms of diagnosis, intervention, therapeutics, and rehabilitation.

Discussions also centered around anticipated future challenges for the local, regional, and international healthcare industry.

Erica Solomon
Senior Editor
26 November 2019

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