Ramin Soltanzadeh | University of Manitoba (original) (raw)

Papers by Ramin Soltanzadeh

مجله دانشکده پزشکی اصفهان, 2012

Background: One of the most remarkable factors in blast cells diagnosis is the increment of nucle... more Background: One of the most remarkable factors in blast cells diagnosis is the increment of nucleus-cytoplasm ratio. Some other parameters like size of the nucleus and the whole, and how round the nucleus is also affect the diagnosis. Methods: In this study, the explicit characters of nucleus were used to identify it from the other parts of blood smear. The nuclei were thus extracted by k-means clustering. The cytoplasm was then extracted based on gray level histogram. Findings: This study was conducted on 100 microscopic images. The method had a specificity of 82.5 and a sensitivity of 84 in the extraction of nuclei. The corresponding values for cytoplasm detection were 75.02 and 79. Conclusion: In this Study present an automatic method to determine the nucleus and cytoplasm. Although the ratio of the cell nucleus to the cytoplasm is an important factor in determining the blast, but other signs such as detecting nucleolus are also effective in the final diagnosis.

Journal of Medical Signals & Sensors, 2013

Studies show that any complications including hemorrhage, lack of blood supply, lack of oxygen su... more Studies show that any complications including hemorrhage, lack of blood supply, lack of oxygen supply and death of cells in a tissue, will have a clear effect on electrical properties of that tissue. Thus, by measuring impedance of a set of tissues, potential problems of the damaged tissue may be found. Since electrical impedance is closely related to the measuring frequency, obviously, every tissue exhibits its own specific impedance according to its electrical properties at each frequency. This research project investigates design and manufacture method of a device for measuring tissue impedance at different frequencies. To this end, design of a multi frequency sinusoidal current source is required. This current source is built using a single harmonic Generator sample (Direct Digital Synthesizer AD9835) with working frequency (design-point frequency) between 1 Hz and 10 MHz and accuracy of 1 Hz and microcontroller (PIC16F628) capability. For measurement and display of tissue imped...

2018 International Conference on Optical MEMS and Nanophotonics (OMN)

A 3-axis scanning MEMS mirror has been developed that is driven by Lorentz force. The structure i... more A 3-axis scanning MEMS mirror has been developed that is driven by Lorentz force. The structure is gimbal-less and made of silicon substrate and aluminium wires and mirror. The actuators embedded in all 4 sides of the mirror enable individual control over the sides. Light beam is directed to an objective point by configuring the involved actuators. The optical tilt angle of the mirror was measured to be 14.5° about Y-axis and 20° about X-axis by consuming 2.3 mW of rms power at resonance mode. A linear vertical motion of more than mathbf200mumathbfm\mathbf{200} \mu \mathbf{m}mathbf200mumathbfm was achieved with 75 mW of dc power. All actuators are individually controllable in both static and dynamic mode by applying dc or ac current.

Copyright © 2012 Ramin Soltanzadeh et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Cr... more Copyright © 2012 Ramin Soltanzadeh et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The main part of each white blood cell (WBC) is its nucleus which contains chromosomes. Although white blood cells (WBCs) with giant nuclei are the main symptom of leukemia, they are not sufficient to prove this disease and other symptoms must be investigated. For example another important symptom of leukemia is the existence of nucleolus in nucleus. The nucleus contains chromatin and a structure called the nucleolus. Chromatin is DNA in its active form while nucleolus is composed of protein and RNA, which are usually inactive. In this paper, to diagnose this symptom and in order to discriminate between nucleoli and chro-matins, we employ curvelet transform, which is a multiresolution transform for detecting 2D singularities in im...

2018 40th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC)

Breathing sounds analysis during sleep is an informative method to study the upper airway. Differ... more Breathing sounds analysis during sleep is an informative method to study the upper airway. Different sleep stages may affect the breathing sound features. In this study, the tracheal breathing sounds were recorded from 5 individuals and the complex Gaussian wavelet of the deceleration phase of about 3000 successive breath cycles were calculated. The segmented portions were divided into 30 seconds episodes and the appropriate sleep stage of each segment were labeled. The results showed that the Mahalanobis distance between the real parts of the complex Gaussian wavelet coefficients and the reference distribution of each stage is changing consistently in different sleep stages.

International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering

This paper investigates microneedle array electrodes for transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulat... more This paper investigates microneedle array electrodes for transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, and compares their performance with conventional surface electrodes. A 3D model of tissue was developed for finite element multiphysics simulations. Investigations included current density in different depths of a tissue, space constant under electrodes, specific absorption ratio of tissue, selectivity of stimulation, temperature rise and blood flow. Results showed that microneedle electrodes have up to 20% higher selectivity than the surface electrodes. Furthermore, it was found that stimulation using microneedle electrodes provides more robust current density at different tissue depths compared to the surface electrode stimulation. Microneedle electrodes showed enhanced stimulation parameters, particularly for targeting a specific nerve in a specific depth of a tissue. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Advances in Integrative Medicine

Journal of Micro/Nanolithography, MEMS, and MOEMS

A low power three-degree-of-freedom scanning micro-mirror is presented. The 2×2 mm mirror is a gi... more A low power three-degree-of-freedom scanning micro-mirror is presented. The 2×2 mm mirror is a gimbaless structure, directly supported by single crystal micro-springs. It is actuated by Lorentz force and is able to tilt about two axes and has linear motion in a third axis. The transient and frequency responses of the micro-mirror are analyzed. The Lagrange's equations of motions, describing the dynamic behavior of the system are presented, and show a good agreement with the experimental results. The fabricated MEMS mirror demonstrated a tilt angle of 22.8º at 247.5 Hz about y-axis, and 13.3º at 292.7 Hz about x-axis, in a 0.1 T magnetic field and 20 mA current on the mirror. Power consumption was 2.6 mW of power in tilting motions in resonant operation. With a total dc drive current of 110 mA, 232 µm linear motion was achieved.

Proceedings

A 3 Degree-of-Freedom (DOF) MEMS mirror is presented which can direct the light beam on an object... more A 3 Degree-of-Freedom (DOF) MEMS mirror is presented which can direct the light beam on an objective point and also operate in a continuous resonance 2 DOF mode. The micro-mirror is actuated by Lorentz force and has 4 actuators embedded in 4 sides of a square mirror. By enabling the actuators, different types of tilting and linear motion can be achieved. The micro-mirror is able to work in either static mode by applying dc current or dynamic mode by applying an ac current at the mirror resonance frequency. The mirror showed a maximum tilt angle of 14.5° and 20° for an input rms power of 2 mW in the resonance mode. A linear motion of 200 µm was achieved by 65 mW of dc power.

Biomedical microdevices, Jan 21, 2017

Electrophysiological devices are connected to the body through electrodes. In some applications, ... more Electrophysiological devices are connected to the body through electrodes. In some applications, such as nerve stimulation, it is needed to minimally pierce the skin and reach the underneath layers to bypass the impedance of the first layer called stratum corneum. In this study, we have designed and fabricated surface microneedle electrodes for applications such as electrical peripheral nerve stimulation. We used molybdenum for microneedle fabrication, which is a biocompatible metal; it was used for the conductive layer of the needle array. To evaluate the performance of the fabricated electrodes, they were compared with the conventional surface electrodes in nerve conduction velocity experiment. The recorded signals showed a much lower contact resistance and higher bandwidth in low frequencies for the fabricated microneedle electrodes compared to those of the conventional electrodes. These results indicate the electrode-tissue interface capacitance and charge transfer resistance ha...

2015 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), 2015

This paper reports on a pilot study of acoustic properties of respiratory sounds in relation to o... more This paper reports on a pilot study of acoustic properties of respiratory sounds in relation to obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Data were breathing sounds of 60 individuals in three groups of non-, Moderate and Severe OSA using the apnea/hypopnea index (AHI) (20 in each group). The sounds power spectral energy and phase responses were calculated for each respiratory phase, and investigated among the groups. The results of power spectral analysis, congruent with imaging studies' findings, suggest a regional narrowing in upper airway that shows its effect in low and high frequencies as an opposite pattern between the OSA and non-OSA groups. The results of phase analysis also support an increased nonlinearity in high frequencies that is speculated to be related to the regional narrowing and thus regional elasticity of the airway during wakefulness.

IEEE Access

In this exploratory study, we studied and qualitatively evaluated a prototype video data collecti... more In this exploratory study, we studied and qualitatively evaluated a prototype video data collection system to capture and analyze fish behavior in a small-scale indoor aquaculture operation. The research objective was to design and develop a hardware / software system that would have the potential to capture meaningful data from which to extract fish size, swim trajectory, and swim velocity, ultimately as information toward an assessment of fish health. The initial work presented in this paper discusses the development choices of the prototype system, including various combinations of lighting and camera positions both inside and outside of the aquaculture tanks, and several post-processing techniques to isolate fish in video, calibrate the distance from camera to fish through water, and infer fish trajectories and swim velocities. Preliminary results provided a qualitative assessment of such a system. Specific results on the system's ability to detect fishes' positions, trajectories, and velocities are presently limited to observational outcomes and descriptive statistics rather than large-scale quantitative analysis. The present work lays a foundation for a future commercially hardened system that would be required for the collection of larger datasets, which would in turn facilitate the future development of machine learning (ML) algorithms to begin to statistically correlate data to fish conditions and behaviors in near-real time. INDEX TERMS Aquaculture, arctic char, fish monitoring, video monitoring, image processing.

Journal of 3D Printing in Medicine

Aim: This study is aimed to compare the structure and performance of 3D-printed and microfabricat... more Aim: This study is aimed to compare the structure and performance of 3D-printed and microfabricated microneedle arrays (MNAs). Materials & methods: MNAs were produced using either stereolithography printing or were micro-fabricated using SU-8 polymer. The structure of both MNA types were tested and compared through scanning electron microscopy. MNA performance was also evaluated through electrical impedence spectroscopy and nerve conduction velocity testing. Results & conclusion: The 3D-printed MNAs were shown to have higher gain than microfabricated MNAs at high frequencies. However, the selectivity of the microfabricated MNAs is more than 3D-printed MNAs. Scanning electron microscopy image comparison also showed significant differences between the output of the 3D-printed MNAs and the microfabricated MNAs. It was understood that the microfabricated MNAs’ geometries are closer to the primary design than the 3D-printed MNAs.

Journal of Medical Signals and Sensors, Jul 17, 2013

Journal of Mechanical Design, 2015

Journal of medical signals and sensors, 2013

Annals of biomedical engineering, Jan 5, 2015

Sleep stage detection is needed in many sleep studies and clinical assessments. Generally, sleep ... more Sleep stage detection is needed in many sleep studies and clinical assessments. Generally, sleep stages are identified using spectral analysis of electrocephologram (EEG) and electrooculogram (EOG) signals. This study, for the first time, has investigated the feasibility of detecting sleep stages using tracheal breathing sounds, and whether the change of breathing sounds due to sleeping stage differs at different periods of sleeping time; the motivation was seeking an alternative technique for sleep stage identification. The tracheal breathing sounds of 12 individuals, who were referred for full overnight polysomnography (PSG) assessment, were recorded using a microphone placed over the suprasternal notch, and analyzed using higher order statistical analysis. Five noise-and-snore-free breathing cycles from wakefulness, REM and Stage II of sleep were selected from each subject for analysis. Data of the REM and Stage II were selected from beginning, middle and close to end of sleeping...

2014 36th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 2014

Breathing sounds analysis conveys valuable information in relation to obstructive sleep apnea (OS... more Breathing sounds analysis conveys valuable information in relation to obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) during both sleep and wakefulness. In this study, we investigated whether the breathings sounds spectral and higher order statistics characteristics (HOS) change from wakefulness to sleep, and more importantly whether this change is associated with severity of OSA. Tracheal breathing sounds of 6 individuals with severe OSA and 6 non-OSA individuals during wakefulness and stage 2 of sleep, both in supine position, were used in this study. The sounds were recorded simultaneously with full overnight polysomnography (PSG) assessment. First, the sounds of 5 noise-free breathing cycles were extracted and sequestered into inspiratory and expiratory phase segments manually for each study subject. After normalizing each sound segment to its energy, spectral and HOS features were calculated. Several features including the median bispectral frequency (MBF), spectral bandwidth (BW) and bispectrum Harmonic Mean (HM) were found to change statistically significantly from wakefulness to sleep mostly in severe OSA group but not as much in non-OSA group. The most prominent and consistent change between the two groups of OSA and non-OSA was observed in MBF; it changed from wakefulness to sleep in the two groups in an opposite manner; this observation is congruent with the hypothesis that the upper airway in OSA population has an increased non-homogeneity.