Publications

Nguyen, TV & Eisman, JA 2013, 'Pharmacogenetics and Pharmacogenomics of Osteoporosis: Personalized Medicine Outlook' in Genetics of Bone Biology and Skeletal Disease, Elsevier BV, pp. 151-167.
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Tran, BH, Center, JR & Nguyen, TV 2013, 'Translational Genetics of Osteoporosis: From Population Association to Individualized Prognosis' in Primer on the Metabolic Bone Diseases and Disorders of Mineral Metabolism: Eighth Edition, John Wiley & Sons, pp. 376-388.
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© 2013 American Society for Bone and Mineral Research. All rights reserved. Genetic factors play an important role in osteoporosis and fracture risk. The genetic studies performed over the past few decades have provided valuable insights into the pathophysiology of osteoporosis. With the decreasing costs of genome-wide scanning, consortia have been able to pool much larger populations in genome-wide association (GWA) studies for complex diseases that overcome some of the statistical problems that have plagued reproducibility from earlier studies in osteoporosis. A major priority in osteoporosis research at present is to develop prognostic models for identifying individuals who have a high risk of fracture. Research into the genetic background of osteoporosis and identification of osteoporosis-related genes can advance our understanding of pathophysiologic mechanisms of fracture. With a rapid improvement in genotyping technology, the next generation of GWA studies will be adding more variants at a low frequency to cover as many single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) as possible.

Yuwono, M, Su, SW & Moulton, BD 2013, 'An Approach to Fall Detection using Gaussian Distribution of Clustered Knowledge' in Agbinya, JI, Custovic, E & Whittington, J (eds), Bio-Informatic Systems, Processing and Applications, River Publishers, Denmark, pp. 1-13.
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The increasing population of elderly people has created significant push to research in fall prevention and detection. World Health Organization noted substantial amounts of incidents and accidents among elderly people due to falls worldwide. This chapter proposes a fall detection algorithm using clustered fall signals from a single waist worn wireless tri-axial accelerometer. The method proposed is to approach fall detection using digital signal processing, data clustering, signal multiplexing, and neural networks.

Abu Mahmoud, M, Al-Jumaily, A & Takruri, MS 2013, 'Wavelet and Curvelet Analysis for Automatic Identification of Melanoma Based on Neural Network Classification', International Journal of Computer Information Systems and Industrial Management (IJCISIM), vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 606-614.
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This paper proposes an automatic skin cancer (melanoma) classification system. The input for the proposed system is a set of images for benign and malignant skin lesions. Different image processing procedures such as smoothing and equalization are applied on these images to enhance their properties. Two segmentation methods are then used to identify the skin lesions before extracting the useful feature information from these images. This information is then passed to the classifier for training and testing. The features used for classification are coefficients created by Wavelet decompositions or simple wrapper Curvelets. Curvelets are known to be more suitable for the images that contain oriented textures and cartoon edges. The recognition accuracy obtained by the two layers back-propagation neural network classifier tested in this experiment is 58.44 % for the Wavelet based coefficients and 86.57 % for the Curvelet based ones

Ahmed, L, Center, J, Bjornerem, A, Bluic, D, Joakimsen, R, Jorgensen, L, Meyer, H, Nguyen, N, Nguyen, T, Omsland, T, Stormer, J, Tell, G, Van Geel, T, Eisman, J & Emaus, N 2013, 'Progressively Increasing Fracture Risk With Advancing Age After Initial Incident Fragility Fracture: The Tromso Study', Journal Of Bone And Mineral Research, vol. 28, no. 10, pp. 2214-2221.
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The risk of subsequent fracture is increased after initial fractures; however, proper understanding of its magnitude is lacking. This population-based study examines the subsequent fracture risk in women and men by age and type of initial incident fracture. All incident nonvertebral fractures between 1994 and 2009 were registered in 27,158 participants in the TromsO Study, Norway. The analysis included 3108 subjects with an initial incident fracture after the age of 49 years. Subsequent fracture (n=664) risk was expressed as rate ratios (RR) and absolute proportions irrespective of death. The rates of both initial and subsequent fractures increased with age, the latter with the steepest curve. Compared with initial incident fracture rate of 30.8 per 1000 in women and 12.9 per 1000 in men, the overall age-adjusted RR of subsequent fracture was 1.3 (95% CI, 1.2-1.5) in women, and 2.0 (95% CI, 1.6-2.4) in men. Although the RRs decreased with age, the absolute proportions of those with initial fracture who suffered a subsequent fracture increased with age; from 9% to 30% in women and from 10% to 26% in men, between the age groups 50-59 to 80+ years. The type of subsequent fracture varied by age from mostly minor fractures in the youngest to hip or other major fractures in the oldest age groups, irrespective of type and severity of initial fracture. In women and men, 45% and 38% of the subsequent hip or other major fractures, respectively, were preceded by initial minor fractures. The risk of subsequent fracture is high in all age groups. At older age, severe subsequent fracture types follow both clinically severe and minor initial incident fractures. Any fragility fracture in the elderly reflects the need for specific osteoporosis management to reduce further fracture risk

Al-Ani, A, Alsukker, A & Khushaba, RN 2013, 'Feature subset selection using differential evolution and a wheel based search strategy', Swarm and Evolutionary Computation, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 15-26.
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Differential evolution has started to attract a lot of attention as a powerful search method and has been successfully applied to a variety of applications including pattern recognition. One of the most important tasks in many pattern recognition systems is to find an informative subset of features that can effectively represent the underlying problem. Specifically, a large number of features can affect the system's classification accuracy and learning time. In order to overcome such problems, we propose a new feature selection method that utilizes differential evolution in a novel manner to identify relevant feature subsets. The proposed method aims to reduce the search space using a simple, yet powerful, procedure that involves distributing the features among a set of wheels. Two versions of the method are presented. In the first one, the desired feature subset size is predefined by the user, while in the second the user only needs to set an upper limit to the feature subset size. Experiments on a number of datasets with different sizes proved that the proposed method can achieve remarkably good results when compared with some of the well-known feature selection methods.

Al-Hajjar, M, Fisher, J, Williams, S, Tipper, JL & Jennings, LM 2013, 'Effect of femoral head size on the wear of metal on metal bearings in total hip replacements under adverse edge-loading conditions', JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL MATERIALS RESEARCH PART B-APPLIED BIOMATERIALS, vol. 101B, no. 2, pp. 213-222.
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Aquilina, P, Chamoli, U, Parr, WCH, Clausen, PD & Wroe, S 2013, 'Finite element analysis of three patterns of internal fixation of fractures of the mandibular condyle', BRITISH JOURNAL OF ORAL & MAXILLOFACIAL SURGERY, vol. 51, no. 4, pp. 326-331.
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Aung, Y & Al-Jumaily, A 2013, 'Neuromotor Rehabilitation System with Real-Time Biofeedback', International Journal of Computer Information Systems and Industrial Management (IJCISIM), vol. 5, pp. 550-556.
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Physical disabilities which caused by neuromotor impairment due to Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) and Cerebrovascular Accident (CVA) affect the persons quality of life. Therefore, physical rehabilitations are required to be performed for the restoration of lost functions as a core treatment for such disabilities. However, the physical rehabilitations are too labor-intensive due to the nature of one-to-one attention in healthcare sectors. Moreover, this kind of injuries and accident cost over $10 billion per annum in healthcare sectors. To overcome above mentioned problems, this paper presents the development of intelligent biofeedback neuromotor rehabilitation system with low cost and motivational approach to close the gap in shortage of therapists, high healthcare cost of TBI, SCI and CVA. Our system designed for user motivation to perform the exercise longer and be used with minimum therapist supervision at home. The rehabilitation exercise aims to increase the upper limb range of motion, and strengthen the associate muscles. Our system utilized sEMG signals as a biofeedback. The users sEMG signals will attain and detect the therapist defined sEMG threshold level to display active muscle in real time during performing exercises. While the system works to retrain the elastic brain via fast recovery method, it will close the gap for the required information, by therapists, about monitoring and tracks the users muscle performance. The effectiveness of the proposed system has been evaluated by performing usability test.

Aung, YM & Al-Jumaily, A 2013, 'Estimation of Upper Limb Joint Angle Using Surface EMG Signal', INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ADVANCED ROBOTIC SYSTEMS, vol. 10.
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Beck, D, Thoms, JA, Perera, D, Schütte, J, Unnikrishnan, A, Knezevic, K, Kinston, SJ, Wilson, NK, O'Brien, TA, Göttgens, B, Wong, JW & Pimanda, JE 2013, 'Genome-wide analysis of transcriptional regulators in human HSPCs reveals a densely interconnected network of coding and noncoding genes.', Blood, vol. 122, no. 14, pp. e12-e22.
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Genome-wide combinatorial binding patterns for key transcription factors (TFs) have not been reported for primary human hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs), and have constrained analysis of the global architecture of molecular circuits controlling these cells. Here we provide high-resolution genome-wide binding maps for a heptad of key TFs (FLI1, ERG, GATA2, RUNX1, SCL, LYL1, and LMO2) in human CD34(+) HSPCs, together with quantitative RNA and microRNA expression profiles. We catalog binding of TFs at coding genes and microRNA promoters, and report that combinatorial binding of all 7 TFs is favored and associated with differential expression of genes and microRNA in HSPCs. We also uncover a previously unrecognized association between FLI1 and RUNX1 pairing in HSPCs, we establish a correlation between the density of histone modifications that mark active enhancers and the number of overlapping TFs at a peak, we demonstrate bivalent histone marks at promoters of heptad target genes in CD34(+) cells that are poised for later expression, and we identify complex relationships between specific microRNAs and coding genes regulated by the heptad. Taken together, these data reveal the power of integrating multifactor sequencing of chromatin immunoprecipitates with coding and noncoding gene expression to identify regulatory circuits controlling cell identity.

Behl, B, Papageorgiou, I, Brown, C, Hall, R, Tipper, JL, Fisher, J & Ingham, E 2013, 'Biological effects of cobalt-chromium nanoparticles and ions on dural fibroblasts and dural epithelial cells', BIOMATERIALS, vol. 34, no. 14, pp. 3547-3558.
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Bishop, AN & Ristic, B 2013, 'Fusion of Spatially Referring Natural Language Statements with Random Set Theoretic Likelihoods', IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AEROSPACE AND ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS, vol. 49, no. 2, pp. 932-944.
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Bishop, AN & Savkin, AV 2013, 'Set-Valued State Estimation and Attack Detection for Uncertain Descriptor Systems', IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, vol. 20, no. 11, pp. 1102-1105.
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Bliuc, D, Nguyen, N, Nguyen, T, Eisman, J & Center, J 2013, 'Compound Risk Of High Mortality Following Osteoporotic Fracture And Refracture In Elderly Women And Men', Journal Of Bone And Mineral Research, vol. 28, no. 11, pp. 2317-2324.
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After fracture there is increased risk of refracture and premature mortality. These outcomes, particularly premature mortality following refracture, have not previously been studied together to understand overall mortality risk. This study examined the long-term cumulative incidence of subsequent fracture and total mortality with mortality calculated as a compound risk and separated according to initial and refracture. Community-dwelling participants aged 60+ years from Dubbo Osteoporosis Epidemiology Study with incident fractures, followed prospectively for further fractures and deaths from 1989 to 2010. Subsequent fracture and mortality ascertained using cumulative incidence competing risk models allowing four possible outcomes: death without refracture; death following refracture; refracture but alive, and event-free. There were 952 women and 343 men with incident fracture. Within 5 years following initial fracture, 24% women and 20% men refractured; and 26% women and 37% men died without refracture. Of those who refractured, a further 50% of women and 75% of men died, so that total 5-year mortality was 39% in women and 51% in men. Excess mortality was 24% in women and 27% in men. Although mortality following refracture occurred predominantly in the first 5 years post-initial fracture, total mortality (post-initial and refracture) was elevated for 10 years. Most of the 5-year to 10-year excess mortality was associated with refracture. The long-term (>10 years) refracture rate was reduced, particularly in the elderly as a result of their high mortality rate. The 30% alive beyond 10 years postfracture were at low risk of further adverse outcomes. Refractures contribute substantially to overall mortality associated with fracture. The majority of the mortality and refractures occurred in the first 5 years following the initial fracture. However, excess mortality was observed for up to 10 years postfracture, predominantly related to that after refracture.

Chan, KY, Dillon, T, Lam, HK, Ling, SSH & Nguyen, HT 2013, 'Special issue on hybrid evolutionary systems for manufacturing processes', APPLIED SOFT COMPUTING, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 1329-1331.
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Chan, MY, Nguyen, ND, Center, JR, Eisman, JA & Nguyen, TV 2013, 'Quantitative ultrasound and fracture risk prediction in non-osteoporotic men and women as defined by WHO criteria', OSTEOPOROSIS INTERNATIONAL, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 1015-1022.
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Chou, J, Green, DW, Singh, K, Hao, J, Ben-Nissan, B & Milthorpe, BK 2013, 'Adipose Stem Cell Coating of Biomimetic ß-TCP Macrospheres by Use of Laboratory Centrifuge', BioResearch Open Access, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 67-71.
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Biomimetic materials such as coral exoskeletons possess unique architectural structures with a uniform and interconnected porous network that can be beneficial as a scaffold material. In addition, these marine structures can be hydrothermally converted to calcium phosphates, while retaining the original structural properties. The ability of biomaterials to stimulate the local microenvironment is one of the main focuses in tissue engineering, and directly coating the scaffold with stem cells facilitates future potential applications in therapeutics and regenerative medicine. In this article we describe a new and simple method that uses a laboratory centrifuge to coat hydrothermally derived beta-tricalcium phosphate macrospheres from coral exoskeleton with stem cells. In this research the optimal seeding duration and speed were determined to be 1?min and 700 g. Scanning electron micrographs showed complete surface coverage by stem cells within 7 days of seeding. This study constitutes an important step toward achieving functional tissue-engineered implants by increasing our understanding of the influence of dynamic parameters on the efficiency and distribution of stem cell attachment to biomimetic materials and how stem cells interact with biomimetic materials.

Chou, J, Hao, J, Ben-Nissan, B, Milthorpe, BK & Otsuka, M 2013, 'Coral Exoskeletons as a Precursor Material for the Development of Calcium Phosphate Drug Delivery System for Bone Tissue Engineering', Biological & Pharmaceutical Bulletin, vol. 36, no. 11, pp. 1662-1665.
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With the global rise in aging of populations, the occurrence of osteoporosis will continue to increase. Biomaterial and pharmaceutical scientists continue to develop innovative strategies and materials to address this disease. In this article, we describe a new perspective and approach into the use of coral exoskeletons as a precursor material to synthesize a calcium phosphate-based drug delivery system. Studies detailing the methodology of the conversion methods and the strategies and approach for the development of these novel drug delivery systems are described. Furthermore, in vivo studies in osteoporotic mice using a drug loaded and chemically modified version of the biomimetic delivery system showed significant cortical and cancellous bone increases. These studies support the notion and the rationale for future research and development of the use of coral exoskeletons as materials for drug delivery applications

Chou, J, Hao, J, Hatoyama, H, Ben-Nissan, B, Milthorpe, BK & Otsuka, M 2013, 'The therapeutic effect on bone mineral formation from biomimetic zinc containing tricalcium phosphate (ZnTCP) in zinc-deficient osteoporotic mice', PLoS One, vol. 8, no. 8, pp. e71821-e71821.
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The aim of this study was to evaluate the therapeutic efficacy of biomimetic zinc-containing tricalcium phosphate (ZnTCP) produced by hydrothermally converting calcium carbonate exoskeletons from foraminifera, in the treatment of osteoporotic mice. X-Ray powder diffraction showed crystallographic structures matching JCPDS profile for tricalcium phosphate. Mass spectroscopy used to calculate total composition amount showed similar amount of calcium (5×104 µg/g) and phosphate (4×104 ppm) after conversion and the presence of zinc (5.18×103 µg/g). In vitro zinc release showed no release in PBS buffer and <1% zinc release in 7 days. In vivo evaluation was done in ovariectomized mice by implanting the ZnTCP samples in the soft tissues near the right femur bone for four weeks. Thirty ddY mice (5 weeks old, average weight of 21 g) were divided into six experimental groups (normal, sham, OVX, ß-TCP, ZnTCP and direct injection of zinc). CT images were taken every two weeks where the bone mineral density (BMD) and bone mineral content (BMC) were calculated by software based on CT images. The ZnTCP group exhibits cortical and cancellous bone growth of 45% and 20% respectively. While sham, OVX and ß-TCP suffered from bone loss. A correlation was made between the significant body weight increase in ZnTCP with the significant increase in plasma zinc level compared with OVX. The presented results indicate that biomimetic ZnTCP were effective in preventing and treating bone loss in osteoporotic mice model.

Chou, J, Hao, J, Kuroda, S, Bishop, DP, Ben-Nissan, B, Milthorpe, BK & Otsuka, M 2013, 'Bone regeneration of rat tibial defect by zinc-tricalcium phosphate (Zn-TCP) from porous Foraminifera carbonate macrospheres', Marine Drugs, vol. 11, no. 12, pp. 5148-5158.
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Foraminifera carbonate exoskeleton was hydrothermally converted to biocompatible and biodegradable zinc-tricalcium phosphate (Zn-TCP) as an alternative biomimetic material for bone fracture repair. Zn-TCP samples implanted in a rat tibial defect model for eight weeks were compared with unfilled defect and beta-tricalcium phosphate showing accelerated bone regeneration compared with the control groups, with statistically significant bone mineral density and bone mineral content growth. CT images of the defect showed restoration of cancellous bone in Zn-TCP and only minimal growth in control group. Histological slices reveal bone in-growth within the pores and porous chamber of the material detailing good bone-material integration with the presence of blood vessels. These results exhibit the future potential of biomimetic Zn-TCP as bone grafts for bone fracture repair.

Chou, J, Ito, T, Bishop, D, Otsuka, M, Ben-Nissan, B & Milthorpe, B 2013, 'Controlled release of simvastatin from biomimetic β-TCP drug delivery system.', PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 1-6.
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Simvastatin have been shown to induce bone formation and there is currently a urgent need to develop an appropriate delivery system to sustain the release of the drug to increase therapeutic efficacy whilst reducing side effects. In this study, a novel drug delivery system for simvastatin by means of hydrothermally converting marine exoskeletons to biocompatible beta-tricalcium phosphate was investigated. Furthermore, the release of simvastatin was controlled by the addition of an outer apatite coating layer. The samples were characterized by x-ray diffraction analysis, fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy and mass spectroscopy confirming the conversion process. The in-vitro dissolution of key chemical compositional elements and the release of simvastatin were measured in simulated body fluid solution showing controlled release with reduction of approximately 25% compared with un-coated samples. This study shows the potential applications of marine structures as a drug delivery system for simvastatin.

Chou, J, Ito, T, Otsuka, M, Ben-Nissan, B & Milthorpe, BK 2013, 'Simvastatin-loaded Beta-tCP Drug Delivery System Induces Bone Formation And Prevents Rhabdomyolysis In OVX Mice', Advanced Healthcare Materials, vol. 2, no. 5, pp. 678-681.
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Bone formation and regeneration is a prolonged process that requires a slow drug release system to assist in the long-term recovery. A drug-delivery system is developed that allows for the controlled release of simvastin, without exhibiting the side effects associated with high concentrations of simvastatin, and is still capable of inducing constant bone formation.

Chou, J, Ito, T, Otsuka, M, Ben-Nissan, B & Milthorpe, BK 2013, 'The Controlled Release Of Simvastatin From Biomimetic Macrospheres', Key Engineering Materials, vol. 529-530, pp. 461-464.
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Simvastatin has been shown to succesfully stimulate bone regeneration and attention has being focussed on developing appropriate delivery carriers for its release. The challenge of deliverying therapeutic concentration of pharmaceutical compunds has bein

Diffner, E, Beck, D, Gudgin, E, Thoms, JAI, Knezevic, K, Pridans, C, Foster, S, Goode, D, Weng, KL, Boelen, L, Metzeler, KH, Micklem, G, Bohlander, SK, Buske, C, Burnett, A, Ottersbach, K, Vassiliou, GS, Olivier, J, Wong, JWH, Goettgens, B, Huntly, BJ & Pimanda, JE 2013, 'Activity of a heptad of transcription factors is associated with stem cell programs and clinical outcome in acute myeloid leukemia', BLOOD, vol. 121, no. 12, pp. 2289-2300.
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Emaus, N, Nguyen, N, Almaas, B, Berntsen, G, Center, J, Christensen, M, Gjesdal, C, Grimsgaard, A, Nguyen, T, Salomonsen, L, Eisman, J & Fonnebo, V 2013, 'Serum Level Of Under-Carboxylated Osteocalcin And Bone Mineral Density In Early Menopausal Norwegian Women', European Journal of Nutrition, vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 49-55.
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Serum level of under-carboxylated osteocalcin (ucOC) is considered a sensitive measure of vitamin K status, and ucOC levels are associated with bone mineral density (BMD) and fracture risk in elderly persons. The aim of this study was to assess the relationship between ucOC and BMD in early menopausal women. The data reported here come from the enrolment in a double-blinded placebo-controlled randomized trial comprising 334 healthy Norwegian women between 50 and 60 years, 1-5 years after menopause, not using warfarin or medication known to affect bone metabolism. Total hip, femoral neck, lumbar spine, and total body BMD and serum level of ucOC and total osteocalcin were measured, and information of lifestyle was collected through questionnaires. The association between ucOC and BMD at all measurement sites was assessed by multiple regression analyses adjusting for possible confounding variables. The absolute serum level of ucOC was significantly and negatively associated with BMD at all measurements sites, both in univariate analyses (p < 0.01) and in multivariate analyses adjusting for years since menopause, smoking status and weight (p < 0.01). However, serum ucOC, expressed as percentage of the total osteocalcin level, was not associated with BMD at any site. Achievement of adequate vitamin K nutritional intake is important, but ucOC expressed as percentage of total osteocalcin levels as reflection of vitamin K status does not seem to play a central role in determining BMD levels in early menopausal women.

Frost, S, Nguyen, N, Center, J, Eisman, J & Nguyen, T 2013, 'Excess Mortality Attributable To Hip-Fracture: A Relative Survival Analysis', Bone, vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 23-29.
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Introduction: Individuals with hip fracture are at substantially increased risk of mortality. The aim of this study was to estimate the excess mortality attributable to hip fracture in elderly men and women. Methods: The Dubbo Osteoporosis Epidemiology Study was designed as a prospective epidemiologic investigation, in which more than 2000 men and women aged 60+ as of 1989 had been followed for 21 years. During the follow-up period, the incidence of atraumatic hip fractures was ascertained by X-ray reports, and mortality was ascertained by the New South Wales Birth, Death and Marriage Registry. Relative survival ratios were estimated by taking into account the age-and-sex specific expected survival in the general Australian population from 1989 to 2010. Results: During the follow-up period 151 women and 55 men sustained a hip fracture. Death occurred in 86 (57%) women and 36 (66%) men. In women, the cumulative relative survival post hip-fracture at 1, 5 and 10 years was 0.83 (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.76-0.89), 0.59 (95% CI 0.48-0.68), and 0.31 (95% Cl 0.20-0.43), respectively; in men, the corresponding estimates of relative survival were: 0.63 (95% CI 0.48-0.75), 0.48 (95% CI 0.32-0.63), and 0.36 (95% CI 0.18-0.56). On average post hip-fracture women died 4 years earlier (median: 4.1, inter-quartile range (IQR) 1.7-7.8) and men died 5 years earlier (median = 4.8, IQR 2.4-7.0) than expected. For every six women and for every three men with hip fracture one extra death occurred above that expected in the background population. Conclusion: Hip fracture is associated with reduced life expectancy, with men having a greater reduction than women, even after accounting for time-related changes in background mortality in the population. These data underscore that hip fracture is an independent clinical risk factor for mortality.

Gentile, C, Muise-Helmericks, RC & Drake, CJ 2013, 'VEGF-mediated phosphorylation of eNOS regulates angioblast and embryonic endothelial cell proliferation', DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY, vol. 373, no. 1, pp. 163-175.
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Goldberg, L, Tijssen, MR, Birger, Y, Hannah, RL, Kinston, SJ, Schuette, J, Beck, D, Knezeyic, K, Schiby, G, Jacob-Hirsch, J, Biran, A, Kloog, Y, Marcucci, G, Bloomfield, CD, Aplan, PD, Pimanda, JE, Goettgens, B & Izraeli, S 2013, 'Genome-scale expression and transcription factor binding profiles reveal therapeutic targets in transgenic ERG myeloid leukemia', BLOOD, vol. 122, no. 15, pp. 2694-2703.
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Green, DW, Padula, M, Santos, J, Chou, J, Milthorpe, BK & Ben-Nissan, B 2013, 'A Therapeutic Potential for Marine Skeletal Proteins in Bone Regeneration.', Marine Drugs, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 1203-1220.
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A vital ingredient for engineering bone tissue, in the culture dish, is the use of recombinant matrix and growth proteins to help accelerate the growth of cultivated tissues into clinically acceptable quantities. The skeletal organic matrices of calcifying marine invertebrates are an untouched potential source of such growth inducing proteins. They have the advantage of being ready-made and retain the native state of the original protein. Striking evidence shows that skeleton building bone morphogenic protein-2/4 (BMP) and transforming growth factor beta (TGF-ß) exist within various marine invertebrates such as, corals. Best practice mariculture and the latest innovations in long-term marine invertebrate cell cultivation can be implemented to ensure that these proteins are produced sustainably and supplied continuously. This also guarantees that coral reef habitats are not damaged during the collection of specimens. Potential proteins for bone repair, either extracted from the skeleton or derived from cultivated tissues, can be identified, evaluated and retrieved using chromatography, cell assays and proteomic methods. Due to the current evidence for bone matrix protein analogues in marine invertebrates, together with the methods established for their production and retrieval there is a genuine prospect that they can be used to regenerate living bone for potential clinical use.

Ho-pham, L, Nguyen, N & Nguyen, T 2013, 'Quantification Of The Relative Contribution Of Estrogen To Bone Mineral Density In Men And Women', Bmc Musculoskeletal Disorders, vol. 14.
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Background: The study quantified the relative contributions of estrogen (E2) and total testosterone (TT) to variation in bone mineral density in men and women. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study which involved 200 men and 415 women aged 18 to 89 years. BMD at the lumbar spine (LS) and femoral neck (FN) was measured by DXA. Serum levels of E2 and TT were measured by electrochemiluminescence immunoassays. The association between E2, TT, and BMD was analyzed by the multiple linear regression model, adjusting for age and BMI. The contribution of each hormone to the variation in BMD was quantified by the bootstrap method. Results: In women, higher serum levels of E2, but not TT, were significantly associated with greater BMD at the FN (P = 0.001) and LS (P < 0.0001). In men, higher serum levels of E2 were independently associated with greater FNBMD (P = 0.008) and LSBMD (P = 0.086). In the multiple linear regression model, age, body weight and E2 accounted for 50-55% variance in FNBMD, and 25% (in men) and 48% (in women) variance in LSBMD. Variation in E2 accounted for 2.5% (95% CI 0.4 - 7.8%) and 11.3% (95% CI 8.1 - 15.3%) variation in FNBMD in men and women, respectively. Moreover, E2 contributed 1.2% (95% CI 0.1 - 5.8%) and 11.7% (95% CI 8.5 - 15.9%) variation in LSBMD in men and women, respectively. Conclusions: Estrogen is more important than testosterone in the determination of age-related bone mineral density men and women of Vietnamese background. However, the relative contributions of estrogen to bone mineral density in men are likely modest

Hossain, MD, Sanagavarapu, AM & Abedin, MJ 2013, 'Beamspace Time-Reversal Microwave Imaging for Breast Cancer Detection', Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, vol. 12, pp. 241-244.
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We propose novel beamspace-DORT and beamspace- TR-MUSIC for microwave imaging to detect breast cancer. The proposed imaging methods employ beamspace transformation in the receiving mode of time reversal process prior to back propagation of recorded received signals. We investigate the effectiveness of the proposed imaging methods using anatomically realistic MRI-derived dense numerical breast phantoms. It is found that the proposed methods, especially the beamspace-TR-MUSIC, achieve improved focusing ability even in the presence of dense fibroglandular tissue clutter.

Hou, HW, Warkiani, ME, Khoo, BL, Li, ZR, Soo, RA, Tan, DSW, Lim, WT, Han, J, Bhagat, AAS & Lim, CT 2013, 'Isolation and retrieval of circulating tumor cells using centrifugal forces', Scientific Reports, vol. 3.
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Presence and frequency of rare circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in bloodstreams of cancer patients are pivotal to early cancer detection and treatment monitoring. Here, we use a spiral microchannel with inherent centrifugal forces for continuous, size-based separation of CTCs from blood (Dean Flow Fractionation (DFF)) which facilitates easy coupling with conventional downstream biological assays. Device performance was optimized using cancer cell lines (> 85% recovery), followed by clinical validation with positive CTCs enumeration in all samples from patients with metastatic lung cancer (n = 20; 5-88 CTCs per mL). The presence of CD133 + cells, a phenotypic marker characteristic of stem-like behavior in lung cancer cells was also identified in the isolated subpopulation of CTCs. The spiral biochip identifies and addresses key challenges of the next generation CTCs isolation assay including antibody independent isolation, high sensitivity and throughput (3 mL/hr); and single-step retrieval of viable CTCs.

Lai, JC, Leung, FH, Ling, SS & Nguyen, HT 2013, 'Hypoglycaemia detection using fuzzy inference system with multi-objective double wavelet mutation differential evolution', Applied Soft Computing, vol. 13, no. 5, pp. 2803-2811.
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In this paper, a fuzzy inference system (FIS) is developed to recognize hypoglycaemic episodes. Hypoglycaemia (low blood glucose level) is a common and serious side effect of insulin therapy for patients with diabetes. We measure some physiological parameters continuously to provide hypoglycaemia detection for Type 1 diabetes mellitus (TIDM) patients. The FIS captures the relationship between the inputs of heart rate (HR), corrected QT interval of the electrocardiogram (ECG) signal (QTc), change of HR, change of QTc and the output of hypoglycaemic episodes to perform the classification. An algorithm called Differential Evolution with Double Wavelet Mutation (DWM-DE) is introduced to optimize the FIS parameters that govern the membership functions and fuzzy rules. DWM-DE is an improved Differential Evolution algorithm that incorporates two wavelet-based operations to enhance the optimization performance. To prevent the phenomenon of overtraining (over-fitting), a validation approach is proposed. Moreover, in this problem, two targets of sensitivity and specificity should be met in order to achieve good performance. As a result, a multi-objective optimization using DWM-DE is introduced to perform the training of the FIS. Experiments using the data of 15 children with TIDM (569 data points) are studied. The data are randomly organized into a training set with 5 patients (l99 data points), a validation set with 5 patients (177 data points) and a testing set with 5 patients (193 data points). The result shows that the proposed FIS tuned by the multi-objective DWM-DE can offer good performance of doing classification.

Maali, Y & Al-Jumaily, A 2013, 'Multi Neural Networks Investigation based Sleep Apnea Prediction', Procedia Computer Science, vol. 24, pp. 97-102.
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Sleep apnea (SA) is recognized as the most important and common type of sleep disorders with several short term and long term side effects on health and prediction of sleep apnea events before they happened can help to prevent these side effects. There are several studies on automated SA detection but not too much works have been done on prediction of apnea's individual episodes. This paper investigated the application of artificial neural networks (ANNs) to predict sleep apnea. Three types of neural networks were investigated: Elman, RBF and feed-forward back propagation on data from 5 patients. Based on the obtained results, generally on all of experiments the best performance is obtained by the feed-forward neural network with average of Area-Under-Curve (AUC) statistic equal to But this superiority was not hold in all individual experiments and each of neural networks were be able to obtain the best result in some cases. This result showed the necessary of more investigation on methods such as dynamic neural networks selections instead of using a fixed model.

Maali, Y & Al-Jumaily, A 2013, 'Self-advising support vector machine', Knowledge-based Systems, vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 214-222.
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The Support Vector Machine (SVM) is one of the most popular machine learning algorithms for classification and regression. SVM displays outstanding performance when utilized in many applications. However, different approaches have been proposed in order

Macha, IJ, Ozyegin, LS, Chou, J, Samur, R, Oktar, FN & Ben-Nissan, B 2013, 'An Alternative Synthesis Method for Di Calcium Phosphate (Monetite) Powders from Mediterranean Mussel (Mytilus galloprovincialis) Shells.', Journal of the Australian Ceramics Society, vol. 49, no. 2, pp. 122-128.
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Marine species, such as corals, sea shells and nacres, attract special interest in bioceramics field for bone graft, bone cements and drug delivery applications. Most of the marine structures are made up of pure calcium carbonate (calcite or aragonite) with a very small amount of an organic matrix. In the past the most common way to transform these structures to hydroxyapatite was hydrothermal transformation method. This current work introduces a new approach for producing fine powders of calcium phosphates from Mediterranean mussel (Mytilus galloprovincialis) shells. A comparative study was carried out to investigate the differences of these powders under only hot plate heating and hot plate heating together with ultrasonic agitation while H3PO4 was added. The temperature of the hotplate was kept constant at 80 °C and then, H3PO4 was added drop wise into the solution for 2 hrs. The mixture was then placed into an oven at 100 °C for 24 hrs. They were further calcined at 800 °C for 3 hrs. XRD, FTIR and ICP-MS were used to identify the structure and composition. It was found that the final powders were predominantly monetite, with some tricalcium phosphate as a secondary phase. This relatively simple and efficient method can be easily applied to produce calcium phosphate precursor powders for a range of biomedical applications.

Masood, A & Al-Jumaily, A 2013, 'Computer Aided Diagnostic Support System for Skin cancer: Review of techniques and algorithms', International Journal of Biomedical Imaging, vol. 2013, pp. 1-22.
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Image-based computer aided diagnosis systems have significant potential for screening and early detection of malignant melanoma. We review the state of the art in these systems and examine current practices, problems, and prospects of image acquisition, pre-processing, segmentation, feature extraction and selection, and classification of dermoscopic images. This paper reports statistics and results from the most important implementations reported to date. We compared the performance of several classifiers specifically developed for skin lesion diagnosis and discussed the corresponding findings. Whenever available, indication of various conditions that affect the technique’s performance is reported. We suggest a framework for comparative assessment of skin cancer diagnostic models and review the results based on these models. The deficiencies in some of the existing studies are highlighted and suggestions for future research are provided.

Masood, A & Al-Jumaily, A 2013, 'Fuzzy C mean Thresholding based Level Set for Automated Segmentation of Skin Lesions', Journal of Signal and Information Processing, vol. 4, no. 3b, pp. 66-71.
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Skin Cancer; Segmentation; Diagnosis; Fuzzy; Thresholding; Level Sets

Nguyen, T & Eisman, J 2013, 'Genetic Profiling And Individualized Assessment Of Fracture Risk', Nature Reviews. Endocrinology, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 153-161.
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Osteoporosis and its consequence of fragility fracture impose a considerable demand on health-care services because fracture is associated with a series of adverse events, including re-fracture and mortality. One of the major priorities in osteoporosis care is the development of predictive models to identify individuals at high risk of fracture for early intervention and management. Existing predictive models include clinical factors and anthropometric characteristics but have not considered genetic variants in the prediction. Genome-wide association studies conducted in the past decade have identified several genetic variants relevant to fracture risk. These genetic variants are common in frequency but have very modest effect sizes. A remaining challenge is to use these genetic data to individualize fracture risk assessment on the basis of an individual's genetic risk profile. Empirical and simulation studies have shown that the usefulness of a single genetic variant for fracture risk assessment is very limited, but a profile of 50 genetic variants, each with odds ratio ranging from 1.02 to 1.15, could improve the accuracy of fracture prediction beyond that obtained by use of existing clinical risk factors. Thus, genetic profiling when integrated with existing risk assessment models could inform a more accurate prediction of fracture risk in an individual.

Nguyen, T, Center, J & Eisman, J 2013, 'Individualized Fracture Risk Assessment: Progresses And Challenges', Current Opinion in Rheumatology, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 532-541.
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Purpose of review Fragility fracture is a major public health burden, because it is associated with a substantial morbidity and mortality. Risk prediction models, including the Fracture Risk Assessment Tool (FRAX) and Garvan Fracture Risk Calculator (GFR

Parr, WCH, Chamoli, U, Jones, A, Walsh, WR & Wroe, S 2013, 'Finite element micro-modelling of a human ankle bone reveals the importance of the trabecular network to mechanical performance: New methods for the generation and comparison of 3D models', JOURNAL OF BIOMECHANICS, vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 200-205.
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Rahman, A & Al-Jumaily, A 2013, 'Design and Development of a Bilateral Therapeutic Hand Device for Stroke Rehabilitation', INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ADVANCED ROBOTIC SYSTEMS, vol. 10.
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Rana, M & Sanagavarapu, AM 2013, 'Convolutional Perfectly Matched Layer ABC for 3-D LOD-FDTD Using Fundamental Scheme', IEEE Microwave and Wireless Components Letters, vol. 23, no. 8, pp. 388-390.
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We present the convolutional perfectly matched layer (CPML) absorbing boundary condition (ABC) for fundamental scheme based 3-D LOD-FDTD. Methods to minimize the resultant computational load for solving 3-D microwave structures are proposed in addition t

Rana, M & Sanagavarapu, AM 2013, 'Nonorthogonal LOD-FDTD Method for EM Scattering from Two-Dimensional Structures', Ieee Transactions On Electromagnetic Compatibility, vol. 55, no. 4, pp. 764-772.
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In this paper, a nonorthogonal locally 1-D finite difference time-domain (LOD-NFDTD) method is presented for electromagnetic (EM) scattering involving curvilinear coordinate system. Formulations of scattered field and convolutional perfectly matched laye

Remenyi, J, van den Bosch, MWM, Palygin, O, Mistry, RB, McKenzie, C, Macdonald, A, Hutvagner, G, Arthur, JSC, Frenguelli, BG & Pankratov, Y 2013, 'miR-132/212 Knockout Mice Reveal Roles for These miRNAs in Regulating Cortical Synaptic Transmission and Plasticity', PLOS ONE, vol. 8, no. 4.
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San, P, Ling, SS & Nguyen, HT 2013, 'Hybrid PSO-based variable translation wavelet neural network and its application to hypoglycemia detection system', Neural Computing & Applications, vol. 23, no. 7-8, pp. 2177-2184.
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To provide the detection of hypoglycemic episodes in Type 1 diabetes mellitus, hypoglycemia detection system is developed by the use of variable translation wavelet neural network (VTWNN) in this paper. A wavelet neural network with variable translation

San, P, Ling, SS & Nguyen, HT 2013, 'Industrial application of evolvable block-based neural network to hypoglycemia monitoring system', IEEE Transactions On Industrial Electronics, vol. 60, no. 12, pp. 5892-5901.
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Insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus is classified as type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM), and it can be further classified as immune-mediated or idiopathic. It is dangerous and can result in unconsciousness, seizures, and even sudden death. The most common physiological parameters to be effected from a hypoglycemic reaction are heart rate and corrected QT interval of the electrocardiogram (ECG) signal. Considering the correlation between physiological parameters of an ECG signal and the status of hypoglycemia, a noninvasive hypoglycemia monitoring system is tested and introduced by proposing a hybrid particle-swarm-optimization-based block-based neural network (BBNN) algorithm. The proposed BBNN model offers advantages over conventional neural networks by performing the simultaneous optimization of both structure and weights. The hybrid particle swarm optimization with wavelet mutation searches for optimized structure and network parameters through particle information over a search space. All the actual data sets of 15 T1DM children were collected at the Department of Health, Government of Western Australia. Several experiments showed that the proposed BBNN performed well in terms of better sensitivity and specificity.

Shames, I, Bishop, AN & Anderson, BDO 2013, 'Analysis of Noisy Bearing-Only Network Localization', IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATIC CONTROL, vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 247-252.
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Shames, I, Bishop, AN, Smith, M & Anderson, BDO 2013, 'Doppler Shift Target Localization', IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AEROSPACE AND ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 266-276.
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Sobala, A & Hutvagner, GJ 2013, 'Small RNAs derived from the 5' end of tRNAs can inhibit protein translation in human cells', RNA Biology, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 553-563.
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Recently, it has been shown that tRNA molecules can be processed into small RNAs that are derived from both the 5' and 3' termini. To date, the function of these tRNA fragments (tRFs) derived from the 5' end of tRNA has not been investigated in depth. We present evidence that conserved residues in tRNA, present in all 5' tRFs, can inhibit the process of protein translation without the need for complementary target sites in the mRNA. These results implicate 5' tRFs in a new mechanism of gene regulation by small RNAs in human cells.

Styrkarsdottir, U, Thorleifsson, G, Sulem, P, Gudbjartsson, DF, Sigurdsson, A, Jonasdottir, A, Jonasdottir, A, Oddsson, A, Helgason, A, Magnusson, OT, BragiWalters, G, Frigge, ML, Helgadottir, HT, Johannsdottir, H, Bergsteinsdottir, K, Ogmundsdottir, MH, Center, JR, Nguyen, TV, Eisman, JA, Christiansen, C, Steingrimsson, E, Jonasson, JG, Tryggvadottir, L, Eyjolfsson, GI, Theodors, A, Jonsson, T, Ingvarsson, T, Olafsson, I, Rafnar, T, Kong, A, Sigurdsson, G, Masson, G, Thorsteinsdottir, U & Stefansson, K 2013, 'Nonsense mutation in the LGR4 gene is associated with several human diseases and other traits', NATURE, vol. 497, no. 7450, pp. 517-520.
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Tran, NT & Hutvagner, GJ 2013, 'Biogenesis and the regulation of the maturation of miRNAs', Essays in Biochemistry, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 17-28.
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Regulation of gene expression is a fundamental process in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms. Multiple regulatory mechanisms are in place to control gene expression at the level of transcription, post-transcription and post-translation to maintain optimal RNA and protein expressions in cells. miRNAs (microRNAs) are abundant short 2123 nt non-coding RNAs that are key regulators of virtually all eukaryotic biological processes. The levels of miRNAs in an organism are crucial for proper development and sustaining optimal cell functions. Therefore the processing and regulation of the processing of these miRNAs are critical. In the present chapter we highlight the most important steps of miRNA processing, describe the functions of key proteins involved in the maturation of miRNAs, and discuss how the generation and the stability of miRNAs are regulated.

Warkiani, ME, Bhagat, AAS, Khoo, BL, Han, J, Lim, CT, Gong, HQ & Fane, AG 2013, 'Isoporous micro/nanoengineered membranes', ACS Nano, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 1882-1904.
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Isoporous membranes are versatile structures with numerous potential and realized applications in various fields of science such as micro/nanofiltration, cell separation and harvesting, controlled drug delivery, optics, gas separation, and chromatography. Recent advances in micro/nanofabrication techniques and material synthesis provide novel methods toward controlling the detailed microstructure of membrane materials, allowing fabrication of membranes with well-defined pore size and shape. This review summarizes the current state-of-the-art for isoporous membrane fabrication using different techniques, including microfabrication, anodization, and advanced material synthesis. Various applications of isoporous membranes, such as protein filtration, pathogen isolation, cell harvesting, biosensing, and drug delivery, are also presented. © 2013 American Chemical Society.

Wong, G, Leung, FH & Ling, SS 2013, 'Predicting Protein-Ligand Binding Site Using Support Vector Machine with Protein Properties', IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, vol. 10, no. 6, pp. 1517-1529.
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Identification of protein-ligand binding site is an important task in structure-based drug design and docking algorithms. In the past two decades, different approaches have been developed to predict the binding site, such as the geometric, energetic, and sequence-based methods. When scores are calculated from these methods, the algorithm for doing classification becomes very important and can affect the prediction results greatly. In this paper, the support vector machine (SVM) is used to cluster the pockets that are most likely to bind ligands with the attributes of geometric characteristics, interaction potential, offset from protein, conservation score, and properties surrounding the pockets. Our approach is compared to LIGSITE, LIGSITEcsc, SURFNET, Fpocket, PocketFinder, Q-SiteFinder, ConCavity, and MetaPocket on the data set LigASite and 198 drug-target protein complexes. The results show that our approach improves the success rate from 60 to 80 percent at AUC measure and from 61 to 66 percent at top 1 prediction. Our method also provides more comprehensive results than the others.

Wong, JJ-L, Ritchie, W, Ebner, OA, Selbach, M, Wong, JWH, Huang, Y, Gao, D, Pinello, N, Gonzalez, M, Baidya, K, Thoeng, A, Khoo, T-L, Bailey, CG, Holst, J & Rasko, JEJ 2013, 'Orchestrated Intron Retention Regulates Normal Granulocyte Differentiation', CELL, vol. 154, no. 3, pp. 583-595.
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Wroe, S, Chamoli, U, Parr, WCH, Clausen, P, Ridgely, R & Witmer, L 2013, 'Comparative Biomechanical Modeling of Metatherian and Placental Saber-Tooths: A Different Kind of Bite for an Extreme Pouched Predator', PLOS ONE, vol. 8, no. 6.
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Wu, J, Peng, Z & Tipper, J 2013, 'Investigation of three-dimensional surface topographies and mechanical properties of hypothesized biological active wear particles from artificial joints', WEAR, vol. 301, no. 1-2, pp. 182-187.
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Wu, J, Peng, Z & Tipper, J 2013, 'Mechanical Properties and Three-Dimensional Topological Characterisation of Micron, Submicron and Nanoparticles from Artificial Joints', TRIBOLOGY LETTERS, vol. 52, no. 3, pp. 449-460.
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Yang, S, Nguyen, N, Center, J, Eisman, J & Nguyen, T 2013, 'Association Between Abdominal Obesity And Fracture Risk: A Prospective Study', Journal Of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, vol. 98, no. 6, pp. 2478-2483.
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Context: Higher body weight is associated with greater bone mineral density (BMD) and lower fracture risk. However, the relationship between abdominal fat mass (aFM) and fracture risk is unclear because of limited prospective data. The present study sought to examine the association between aFM, BMD, and fracture risk. Methods: The study was designed as a prospective investigation, in which a sample of 1126 participants (360 men and 766 women) aged 50 years or older had been continuously followed up for an average of 5 years. The mean age of participants was 71 years (range, 5794 years). At baseline, BMD at the femoral neck and lumbar spine and aFM were measured by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry. The incidence of low-trauma and nonpathological fractures was ascertained prospectively from X-ray reports. Results: During the follow-up period, 19 men and 107 women had sustained a fracture. In women, each 1-kg loweraFMwas associated with a50%higher risk of fracture (hazard ratio [HR], 1.50;95% confidence interval [CI], 1.102.05) after adjustment for age, femoral neck BMD, falls, stature, physical activity, and prior fracture. Subgroup analysis by fracture type found that the association was mainly observed in clinical vertebral fracture (HR, 1.96; 95% CI, 1.223.13). In men, although there was no statistically significant association between aFM and fracture risk (HR, 1.15; 95% CI, 0.582.25), the strength of this finding is affected negatively by the low number of fractures. Conclusions: Lower abdominal fat was significantly associated with an higher fracture risk in women.

Young, JA, Ting, KK, Li, J, Moller, T, Dunn, L, Lu, Y, Moses, J, Prado-Lourenco, L, Khachigian, LM, Ng, M, Gregory, PA, Goodall, GJ, Tsykin, A, Lichtenstein, I, Hahn, CN, Nham, T, Shackel, N, Kench, JG, McCaughan, G, Vadas, MA & Gamble, JR 2013, 'Regulation of vascular leak and recovery from ischemic injury by general and VE-cadherin-restricted miRNA antagonists of miR-27', BLOOD, vol. 122, no. 16, pp. 2911-2919.
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Abu Mahmoud, MK, Al-Jumaily, A, Maali, Y & Anam, K 2013, 'Classification of Malignant Melanoma and Benign Nevi from Skin Lesions Based onSupport Vector Machine', IEEE 5th International conference on Computational Intelligence, Modelling and Simulation, International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Modelling and Simulation, CIMSim2013, South Korea, pp. 236-241.
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This paper proposes an automated system for discrimination between melanocytic nevi and malignant melanoma. The proposed system used a number of features extracted from histo-pathological images of skin lesions through image processing techniques which consisted of a spatially adaptive color median lter for ltering and a Kmeans clustering for segmentation. The extracted features were reduced by using sequential feature selection and then classied by using support vector machine (SVM) to diagnose skin biopsies from patients as either malignant melanoma or benign nevi. The proposed system was able to achieve a good result with classication accuracy of 88.9%, sensitivity of 87.5% and specicity of 100%.

Al-Ani, A, Mesbah, M, van Dun, B & Dillon, H 2013, 'Fuzzy Logic-Based Automatic Alertness State Classification Using Multi-channel EEG Data', Lecture Notes in Computer Science, International Conference on Neural Information Processing, Springer, Daegu, Korea, pp. 176-183.
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This paper represents an attempt to automatically classify alertness state using information extracted from multi-channel EEG. To reduce the amount of data and improve the performance, a channel selection method based on support vector machine (SVM) classifier has been performed. The features used for the EEG channel selection process and subsequently for alertness classification represent the energy values of the five EEG rhythms; namely d, ?, a, ß and ?. In order to identify the feature/channel combination that leads to the best alertness state classification performance, we used a fuzzy rule-based classification system (FRBCS) that utilizes differential evolution in constructing the rules. The results obtained using the FRBCS were found to be comparable to those of SVM but with the added advantage of revealing the rhythm/channel combination associated with each alertness state.

Ali, MM, Al-Ani, A, Eamus, D & Tan, DK 2013, 'An Algorithm Based on the RGB Colour Model to Estimate Plant Chlorophyll and Nitrogen Contents', 2013 International Conference on Sustainable Environment and Agriculture, International Conference on Sustainable Environment and Agriculture, International Association of Computer Science & Information Technology Press, Abu Dhabi, UAE, pp. 52-56.
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Leaf colour gives a good indication of chlorophyll (Ch) and nitrogen (N)status in plants. In this paper we developed a new, easy to use and non-destructive diagnostic approach to detect plantCh and N levels using an image processing technique developed using the RGB (Red, Green and Blue) colour model. The experiment was conducted on tomato (Tommy Toy) in field with three N treatments (0, 60 and 140 kg N / ha), where leaf images were collected using a handheld scanner. The new algorithm achieves superior correlation with the value of Ch and N, measured in laboratory, compared with the existing non-destructive methods of SPAD 502 and Dark green Colour Index (DGCI ).

Aljaafreh, AO, Gill, AQ, Al-Ani, A, Al-adaileh, RM & Alzoubi, YI 2013, 'Factors Influencing Customer's Initial Trust of Internet Banking Services in the Jordanian Context', 22nd IBIMA Conference, International Business Information Management, IBIM, Rome, Italy, pp. 281-288.
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Internet banking services (IBS) offer many benefits to customers and banks. IBS have widely adopted and used in developed countries, however IBS adoption in developing countries such as Jordan is still low. Lack of customer trust is considered as the most important impediment to the use of IBS in developing countries. The aim of this study is to investigate and identify the factors that influence customers initial trust of IBS in the Jordanian context. This paper adopts the qualitative literature survey approach and reports two main categories: Human category and Information Technology category. Human category includes: personality- based trust, cognition-based trust (Reputation), Institutional-based trust (structural assurance), social factors (culture) and supporting factors (relative advantages). Information Technology category includes: website factors (security, privacy, and general online experiences)). We argue that these factors can be useful for organisations in understanding and addressing customers initial trust about IBS in the Jordanian context.

Amirsadri, A, Bishop, AN, Kim, J, Trumpf, J & Petersson, L 2013, 'Consistency analysis for data fusion: Determining when the unknown correlation can be ignored', Control, Automation and Information Sciences (ICCAIS), 2013 International Conference on, IEEE, pp. 97-102.
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Anam, K & Al-Jumaily, A 2013, 'Real-time Classification of Finger Movements using Two-channel Surface Electromyography', Proceedings of the International Congress on Neurotechnology, Electronics and Informatics, International Congress on Neurotechnology, Electronics and Informatics, INSTICC, Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal, pp. 218-223.
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The use of a small number of Electromyography (EMG) channels for classifying the finger movement is a challenging task. This paper proposes the recognition system for decoding the individual and combined finger movements using two channels surface EMG. The proposed system utilizes Spectral Regression Discriminant Analysis (SRDA) for dimensionality reduction, Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) for classification and the majority vote for the classification smoothness. The experimental results show that the proposed system was able to classify ten classes of individual and combined finger movements, offline and online with accuracy 97.96 % and 97.07% respectively.

Anam, K, Al-Jumaily, A & Khushaba, RN 2013, 'Two-Channel Surface Electromyography for Individual and Combined Finger Movements', 35th Annual International Conference of the IEEE EMBS 2013, International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, IEEE, Osaka, Japan, pp. 4961-4964.
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This paper proposes the pattern recognition system for individual and combined finger movements by using two channel electromyography (EMG) signals. The proposed system employs Spectral Regression Discriminant Analysis (SRDA) for dimensionality reduction, Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) for classification and the majority vote for the classification smoothness. The advantage of the SRDA is its speed which is faster than original LDA so that it could deal with multiple features. In addition, the use of ELM which is fast and has similar classification performance to well-known SVM empowers the classification system. The experimental results show that the proposed system was able to recognize the individual and combined fingers movements with up to 98 % classification accuracy by using only just two EMG channels.

Argha, A, Su, SW, Nguyen, H & Li, L 2013, 'The Application of Discrete Sliding Mode Control in Parabolic PDE Dynamics', Proceedings of the Australian Control Conference 2013, Australian Control Conference, IEEE, Perth, Australia, pp. 152-157.
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In this paper, the problem of applying Discrete Sliding Mode Control (DSMC) on spatially finite-dimensional systems arising from discretization of bi-variate Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) describing spatio-temporal systems is studied. To this end, heat transfer PDE is discretized to create 2D discrete dynamics and eventually this 2D spatiotemporal discrete form is represented in 1D vectorial form. In order to study the effect of discrepancy between original PDE dynamics and their discrete schemes, an uncertainty term is also considered for the obtained discrete dynamics. According to the notion of strong stability and, in addition, using scaling matrices (similarity transformation), a new method for considering the stability of discrete-time systems in the presence of general uncertainty term (matched and unmatched) is developed. It is also shown that the proposed method in this paper can be used for the case with spatial constraints on the actuation. Consequently, as special cases, the problem of spatially piecewise constant, sparse and also boundary control input are studied.

Argha, R, Li, L & Su, SW 2013, 'A New Approach to Applying Discrete Sliding Mode Control to 2D systems', Proceedings of the 52nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, IEEE, Florence, Italy, pp. 3584-3589.
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Sliding mode control has been applied previously to a specific form of 2D systems (Roesser model). In this paper a new approach (1D vectorial form) is introduced for this problem. Using 1D form to represent 2D systems can be used as an alternative strategy to reduce the inherent complexity of 2D systems and their applications. Unlike Wave Advanced Model (WAM) form (proposed by Porter and Aravena), the suggested 1D vectorial form, in this paper, has invariable dimension and consequently can be converted to regular form for sliding mode control (SMC). In this paper, the first Fornasini and Marchesini (FM) model of 2D systems which is a second order recursive form is considered. Meantime, the suggested method can be simply deployed to other first or second order 2D models.

Aung, Y & Al-Jumaily, A 2013, 'Illusion Approach for Upper Limb Motor Rehabilitation', International Congress on Neurotechnology, Electronics and Informatics, International Congress on Neurotechnology, Electronics and Informatics, INSTICC, Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal.
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Taking the advantage of human brain plasticity nature, Augmented Reality (AR) based Illusion System (ARIS) for upper limb rehabilitation has developed. The ARIS aims to restore the lost functions of upper limb due to various motor injuries. It incorporates with AR technology to build up the upper limb rehabilitation exercise and computer vision with color recognition technique to comply Fool-the-Brain concept for fast recovery of neural impairments. The upper limb exercise that developed in ARIS is to promote the impaired arm range of motion by moving along the predefined trajectory of the AR based exercise. In ARIS, the real impaired arm will be overlapped by the virtual arm throughout the rehabilitation exercise to create the illusion scene. In the case of real arm cannot perform the required task, virtual arm will take over the job of real one and will let the user to perceive the sense that he/she is still able to perform the reaching movement by own effort to the destination point which is the main idea of ARIS. The validation of ARIS was conducted as a preliminary stage and the outcome are discussed.

Bishop, AN 2012, 'False-Data Attacks in Stochastic Estimation Problems with Only Partial Prior Model Information', 2012 International Conference on Control, Automation and Information Sciences (ICCAIS), International Conference on Control, Automation and Information Sciences, IEEE, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, pp. 1-6.
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The security of state estimation in critical networked infrastructure such as the transportation and electricity (smart grid) networks is an increasingly important topic. Here, the problem of recursive estimation and model validation for linear discrete-time systems with partial prior information is examined. Further, detection of false-data attacks on robust recursive estimators of this type is considered. The framework considered in this work is stochastic. An underlying linear discrete-time system is considered where the statistics of the driving noise is assumed to be known only partially. A set-valued estimator is then derived and the conditional expectation is shown to belong to an ellipsoidal set consistent with the measurements and the underlying noise description. When the underlying noise is consistent with the underlying partial model and a sequence of realized measurements is given then the ellipsoidal, set-valued, estimate is computable using a Kalman filter-type algorithm. A group of attacking entities is then introduced with the goal of compromising the integrity of the state estimator by hijacking the sensor and distorting its output. It is shown that in order for the attack to go undetected, the distorted measurements need to be carefully designed.

Bishop, AN 2013, 'Stabilization and station keeping for angular constrained triangular formations on the ocean surface', Control Conference (CCC), 2013 32nd Chinese, Chinese Control Conference, IEEE, Xi'an, China, pp. 6850-6855.
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This paper considers the problem of distributed triangular formation control for a group of three agents positioned on the surface of the ocean and experiencing a non-zero mean offset velocity referred to as Stoke's drift. We provide a result which states simply that the agents converge to the desired formation shape and that the mean centre of mass for the agents is held stationary on the ocean surface. © 2013 TCCT, CAA.

Bishop, AN, Summers, TH & Anderson, BDO 2013, 'Stabilization of stiff formations with a mix of direction and distance constraints', Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Control Applications, IEEE International Conference on Control Applications/International Symposium on Intelligent Control, IEEE, Hyderabad, India, pp. 1194-1199.
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Heterogenous formation shape control with a mix of inter-agent distance and bearing constraints involves the design of distributed control laws that ensure the formation moves such that these inter-agent constraints are achieved and maintained. This paper looks at the design of a distributed control scheme to solve the mixed constraint formation control problem with an arbitrary number of agents. A gradient control law is proposed based on the mathematical notion of a stiff formation structure and a corresponding stiff constraint matrix (which has origins in graph theory). This work provides an interesting and novel contrast to much of the existing work in formation control where distance-only or bearing-only constraints are typically maintained. A stability analysis is sketched and a number of other technical results are given. © 2013 IEEE.

Bladen, CL, Teramura, S, Russell, SL, Fujiwara, K, Fisher, J, Ingham, E, Tomita, N & Tipper, JL 2013, 'Analysis of wear, wear particles, and reduced inflammatory potential of vitamin E ultrahigh-molecular-weight polyethylene for use in total joint replacement', JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL MATERIALS RESEARCH PART B-APPLIED BIOMATERIALS, WILEY-BLACKWELL, pp. 458-466.
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Bladen, CL, Tzu-Yin, L, Fisher, J & Tipper, JL 2013, 'In vitro analysis of the cytotoxic and anti-inflammatory effects of antioxidant compounds used as additives in ultra high-molecular weight polyethylene in total joint replacement components', JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL MATERIALS RESEARCH PART B-APPLIED BIOMATERIALS, WILEY, pp. 407-413.
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Brennan, SE, Nham, T, Clayton, A, McGowan, EM, Cozzi, PJ & Martiniello-Wilks, R 2013, 'PROSTATE CANCER EXOSOMES OFFERING NOVEL CIRCULATING BIOMARKERS FOR EARLY CANCER DIAGNOSIS AND PROGNOSIS', JOURNAL OF GENE MEDICINE, 8th Meeting of the Australasian-Gene-Therapy-Society, WILEY-BLACKWELL, Univ Technol, Sydney, AUSTRALIA, pp. 331-332.

Chai, R, Ling, SS, Hunter, G, Tran, YH & Nguyen, HT 2013, 'Classification of wheelchair commands using brain computer interface: comparison between able-bodied persons and patients with tetraplegia', Proceedings of the 35th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, IEEE, Osaka, Japan, pp. 989-992.
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This paper presents a three-class mental task classification for an electroencephalography based brain computer interface. Experiments were conducted with patients with tetraplegia and able bodied controls. In addition, comparisons with different time-windows of data were examined to find the time window with the highest classification accuracy. The three mental tasks used were letter composing, arithmetic and imagery of a Rubiks cube rolling forward; these tasks were associated with three wheelchair commands: left, right and forward, respectively. An eyes closed task was also recorded for the algorithms testing and used as an additional on/off command. The features extraction method was based on the spectrum from a Hilbert-Huang transform and the classification algorithm was based on an artificial neural network with a fuzzy particle swarm optimization with cross-mutated operation. The results show a strong eyes closed detection for both groups with average accuracy at above 90%. The overall result for the combined groups shows an improved average accuracy of 70.6% at 1s, 74.8% at 2s, 77.8% at 3s, 79.6% at 4s and 81.4% at 5s. The accuracy for individual groups were lower for patients with tetraplegia compared to the able-bodied group, however, does improve with increased duration of the time-window.

Chan, MY, Center, JR, Eisman, JA & Nguyen, TV 2013, 'RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BODY COMPOSITION AND OSTEOARTHRITIS IN PRE-AND POSTMENOPAUSALWOMEN', OSTEOPOROSIS INTERNATIONAL, IOF Regionals - 4th Asia-Pacific Osteoporosis Meeting, SPRINGER LONDON LTD, Hong Kong, PEOPLES R CHINA, pp. S541-S542.

Chan, MY, Frost, SA, Center, JR, Eisman, JA & Nguyen, TV 2013, 'BODYMASS INDEX AND FRACTURE RISK: A BONE MINERAL DENSITY-DRIVEN ASSOCIATION', OSTEOPOROSIS INTERNATIONAL, IOF Regionals - 4th Asia-Pacific Osteoporosis Meeting, SPRINGER LONDON LTD, Hong Kong, PEOPLES R CHINA, pp. S532-S533.

Dehestani, D, Su, SW, Nguyen, HT & Guo, Y 2013, 'Robust Fault Tolerant Application for HVAC System Based on Combination of online SVM and ANN Black Box Model', 2013 European Control Conference, European Control Conference, IEEE, Zurich, Switzerland, pp. 2976-2981.
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Efficient heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems are one of the big challenges today around the world. The fault detection and isolation (FDI) play a significant role in the monitoring, repairing and maintaining of technical systems for the final destination of cost reduction. FDI makes it possible to reduce total cost effective of maintenance and thus increase the capacity utilization rates of equipment. Reduction of energy wasting in the system by on time fault detection is another goal. Therefore, this work proposes a new fault detector based on a black box Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model and online support vector machines (SVM) classifier which integrates a dimension reduction scheme to analyze the failure of air fan supply and dampers fault. The key advantage of this algorithm is to make robustness for SVM to recognize a faulty condition with unexpected sensors values. The ANN generates a high accurate model which is based reference for SVM classifier. Now by using this black box model we make possibility of robustness for SVM to increase detection probability. Finally, a series of faulty experimental data are applied to evaluate the effectiveness of the robust classifier. Final results show that online SVM can detect accurately the air supply fan fault and damper fault of a HVAC system with minimum usage data. It is also outperforms offline SVM on such energy systems for classification.

Fathollahiopur, S, Maziarfar, S & Tavakoli, J 2013, 'Characterization and evaluation of acacia gum loaded PVA hybrid wound dressing', 2013 20th Iranian Conference on Biomedical Engineering, ICBME 2013, pp. 149-154.
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Hydrogels based on natural polysaccharides are found to be so appealing for wound healing applications. The present study deals with the synthesis and characterization of PVA/acacia gum hybrid hydrogels where Arabic gum was evaluated as network properties improvement factor in hybrid hydrogel with the capability of antimicrobial agent (erythromycin) delivery in wound site. The comparison of drug release from mentioned hydrogel wound dressing with pure PVA hydrogel in stimulated wound fluid, swelling studies as a function of additive type, pH and temperature has been discussed. Eventually, the hybrid film was characterized by SEM. All of the observed results indicate that the hybrid hydrogel could easily be used as functional wound dressing to control the rate of antibiotic drug release to the wound site. © 2013 IEEE.

Gozasht, F & Sanagavarapu, AM 2013, 'Miniaturized Slot PIFA Antenna for Tripleband Implantable Biomedical Applications', 2013 IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Workshop Series on RF and Wireless Technologies for Biomedical and Healthcare Applications (IMWS-BIO), IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Workshop Series on RF and Wireless Technologies for Biomedical and Healthcare Applications (IMWS-Bio), IEEE, Singapore, pp. 1-3.
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This paper presents the design of a triple-band implantable miniaturised slot PIFA antenna for Medical Implant Communication Service (MICS) band at 433MHz, Wireless Medical Telemetry Service (WMTS) band at 1430 MHz and Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) band at 2.4GHz. Simulations based on homogeneous and inhomogeneous phantoms are employed to design the proposed small antenna suitable for implanting in the arm or under the chest. The measured results are obtained by immersing a prototype of the proposed antenna in a phantom. The antenna occupies a volume less than 1cm3 and its size reduction is about 50% compared to the standard E-shaped patch antenna reported in the literature

Gozasht, F, Hossain, MD & Sanagavarapu, AM 2013, 'Miniaturized E-Shaped PIFA Antenna for Wideband Implantable Biomedical Applications', International Conference on Electromagnetics in Advanced Applications (ICEAA) 2013, IEEE, Torino, Italy, pp. 832-835.
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Green, D, Padula, M, Santos, J, Chou, J, Milthorpe, BK & Ben-Nissan, B 2012, 'A new role for marine skeletal proteins in regenerative orthopaedics', Key Engineering Materials (Volumes 529 - 530) bioceramics 24, Bioceramics, Scientific.net, Fukuoka, Japan, pp. 654-659.
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Use of ready-made marine skeletons is one of the simplest possible remedies to major problems hindering the future development of regenerative orthopaedics- such as, providing a richness of framework designs and now a potentially rich, accessible source

Guan, G, Warkiani, ME, Luan, KB, Lim, CT, Chen, PCY & Han, J 2013, 'High throughput circulating tumor cell isolation using trapezoidal inertial microfluidics', 17th International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences, MicroTAS 2013, pp. 23-25.
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A novel Dean coupled inertial microfluidic device with trapezoidal cross-section spiral channel for ultra-fast, label- free enrichment of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from clinically relevant blood volumes is reported in this work. Using this single spiral microchannel with one inlet and two outlets, we have successfully isolated and recovered more than 80% of cancer cell line cells spiked in 7.5 mL of blood within 8 min with high purity. Putative CTCs were detected and isolated from 100% patient samples with advanced stage metastatic breast and lung cancer using standard biomarkers. DNA fluorescence in-situ hybridization (FISH) was also carried out to evaluate HER2 status in CTCs isolated from patient samples. Copyright © (2013) by the Chemical and Biological Microsystems Society All rights reserved.

Hossain, MD & Sanagavarapu, AM 2013, 'Beamspace Time Reversal Processing for Localization of Breast Cancer in 3-D Phantoms', 2013 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society International Symposium (APSURSI), IEEE, Orlando, USA, pp. 2034-2035.
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Hossain, MD & Sanagavarapu, AM 2013, 'Breast Cancer Detection in Highly Dense Numerical Breast Phantoms Using Time Reversal', International Conference on Electromagnetics in Advanced Applications (ICEAA) 2013, IEEE, Torino, Italy, pp. 859-862.
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Hossain, MD & Sanagavarapu, AM 2013, 'Coherent Sub-Space Processing for Time Reversal Microwave Imaging', Proceedings of the 2013 International Symposium on Electromagnetic Theory, URSI International Symposium on Electromagnetic Theory, IEEE, Hiroshima, Japan, pp. 254-257.
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Hossain, MD & Sanagavarapu, AM 2013, 'Coherent Time Reversal Minimum Variance Beamforming for the Localization of Tissue Malignancies in Dense Breast Phantoms', Proceedings of the Asia Pacific Microwave Conference (APMC) 2013, Asia-Pacific Microwave Conference, IEEE, Seoul, Korea, pp. 377-379.
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The time reversal (TR) based minimum variance beamforming, both the standard capon beamforming (SCB) and robust capon beamforming (RCB) techniques for microwave imaging of breast for early stage breast cancer detection is considered in this paper. The performance of coherent signal subspace processing for TR-SCB and TR-RCB techniques is investigated. We have used anatomically realistic numerical breast phantoms in FDTD simulations. We consider 2D sagittal slice of the breast phantom in 2D FDTD simulation. Our simulation results indicate that coherent signal subspace processing significantly improves the performance of TR based minimum variance beamforming techniques.

Jing, T, Ramji, R, Warkiani, ME, Lim, CT, Han, J & Chen, CH 2013, 'High throughput single cancer cell encapsulation and self sorting for protease assay by using jetting microfluidics', 17th International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences, MicroTAS 2013, pp. 1373-1375.
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In this work, a droplet microfluidic device integrated with droplet sorting function was presented for single cancer cell encapsulations and protease activity measurements. Individual cells were encapsulated into aqueous droplets at flow focusing junction under jetting conditions. Droplets with cells encapsulated inside are larger than other empty droplets, enabling effective droplet sorting through a deterministic lateral displacement micro-pillar design. All droplets with cells are therefore collected by an observation chamber for enzymatic activity monitoring. Here we focused on measuring matrix metalloproteinase (MMPs) secretion intensities at the individual cell level to obtain further insights into the malignant characteristics of these cells.

Maali, Y & Al-Jumaily, A 2013, 'Comparison of Neural Networks for Prediction of Sleep Apnea', NEUROTECHNIX: International Congress on Neurotechnology, Electronics and Informatics, International Congress on Neurotechnology, Electronics and Informatics, SCITEPRESS, Algarve, Portugal.
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Sleep apnea (SA) is the most important and common component of sleep disorders which has several short term and long term side effects on health. There are several studies on automated SA detection but not too much works have been done on SA prediction. This paper discusses the application of artificial neural net-works (ANNs) to predict sleep apnea. Three types of neural networks were investigated: Elman, cascade-forward and feed-forward back propagation. We assessed the performance of the models using the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve, particularly the area under the ROC curves (AUC), and statistically compare the cross validated estimate of the AUC of different models. Based on the obtained results, generally cascade-forward model results are better with average of AUC around 80%

Masood, A, Al-Jumaily, A & Maali, Y 2013, 'Level Set Initialization Based on Modified Fuzzy C Means Thresholding for Automated Segmentation of Skin Lesions', Lecture Notes in Computer Science, International Conference on Neural Information Processing, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, Daegu, Korea, pp. 341-351.
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Segmentation of skin lesion is an important step in the overall automated diagnostic systems used for early detection of skin cancer. Skin lesions can have various different forms which makes segmentation a difficult and complex task. Different methods are present in literature for improving results for skin lesion segmentation. Each method has some pros and cons and it is observed that none of them can be regarded as a generalized method working for all types of skin lesions. The paper proposes an algorithm that combines the advantages of clustering, thresholding and active contour methods currently being used independently for segmentation purposes. A modified algorithm for thresholding based on fusion of Fuzzy C mean clustering and histogram thresholding is applied to initialize level set automatically and also for estimating controlling parameters for level set evolution. The performance of level set segmentation is subject to appropriate initialization, so the proposed algorithm is being compared with some other state-of-the-art initialization methods. The work has been tested on clinical database of 270 images. Parameters for performance evaluation are presented in detail. Increased true detection rate and reduced false positive and false negative errors confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method for skin cancer detection.

Masood, A, Al-Jumaily, A, Noori Hoshyar, A & Masood, O 2013, 'Automated Segmentation of Skin Lesions: Modified Fuzzy C mean Thresholding Based Level Set Method', 2013 16th International Multi Topic Conference, International Multi-Topic Conference, IEEE, Lahore, pp. 201-206.
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Accurate segmentation of skin lesion can play a vital role in early detection of skin cancer. Taking the complexity and varieties of skin lesion images into consideration, we propose a new algorithm that combines the advantages of clustering, thresholding and active contour methods currently being used independently for segmentation purposes. A modified Fuzzy C mean thresholding algorithm is applied to initialize level set automatically and also for estimating controlling parameters for level set evolution. The performance of level set segmentation is subject to appropriate initialization, so the proposed initialization method is compared to some other state of the art initialization methods present in literature. The work has been tested on a clinical database of 238 images. Parameters for performance evaluation are presented in detail. Increased true detection rate and reduced false positive and false negative errors confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method for skin cancer detection.

Nguyen, DT, Jin, C, Thiagalingam, A & McEwan, A 2013, 'A computer simulation study on the applicability of 3D electrical impedance tomography for pulmonary perfusion defect imaging', IFMBE Proceedings, pp. 967-970.
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Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) has many advantages as a medical imaging modality. It is non-invasive, radiation-free and portable. This technique could be used for the diagnosis of pulmonary embolism, which up to now does no have a satisfactory solution. However, the current resolution of EIT is very low, rendering its sensitivity for perfusion defects not yet suitable for clinical application. This paper presents a simplified computer simulated model using 3D EIT to image the perfusion defects. A FEM mesh of 122 880 elements is used to solve the forward voltages using algorithms built-in to EIDORS, an open source software for EIT. The EIT system simulated has 4 rings of 16 electrodes, excited in adjacent patterns. The resulting voltage measurements with added white noise at 24 dB are reconstructed on a coarser mesh of 7680 elements. The results show that 3D EIT can image perfusion defects as small as 5% of a lung volume in the upper lung regions. Larger defects are observable from the reconstructed images in all regions of the lung. Although the study is simple and therefore suffers from several drawbacks, the results are encouraging for future application of this technique in perfusion defect imaging. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.

Nguyen, DT, Kosobrodov, R, Barry, MA, Chik, W, Jin, C, Oh, TI, Thiagalingam, A & McEwan, A 2013, 'Electrode-Skin contact impedance: In vivo measurements on an ovine model', XV INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ELECTRICAL BIO-IMPEDANCE (ICEBI) & XIV CONFERENCE ON ELECTRICAL IMPEDANCE TOMOGRAPHY (EIT), 15th International Conference on Electrical Bio-Impedance (ICEBI) / 14th Conference on Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT), IOP PUBLISHING LTD, Heilbad Heiligenstadt, GERMANY.
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Nguyen, DT, Kosobrodov, R, Barry, MA, Chik, W, Pouliopoulos, J, Oh, TI, Thiagalingam, A & McEwan, A 2013, 'Preliminary Results on Different Impedance Contrast Agents for Pulmonary Perfusion Imaging with Electrical Impedance Tomography', XV INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ELECTRICAL BIO-IMPEDANCE (ICEBI) & XIV CONFERENCE ON ELECTRICAL IMPEDANCE TOMOGRAPHY (EIT), 15th International Conference on Electrical Bio-Impedance (ICEBI) / 14th Conference on Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT), IOP PUBLISHING LTD, Inst Bioprozess & Analysenmesstechnik, Heilbad Heiligenstadt, GERMANY.
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Nguyen, DT, Krishnamurthy, V & Bishop, AN 2013, 'A distributed control scheme for triangular formations with Markovian disturbances', Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Control Applications, IEEE International Conference on Control Applications, IEEE, Hyderabad, India, pp. 1183-1187.
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This work details a distributed control system for triangular formation control where the control actions applied by the agents can be chosen from a set of values during run-time (as opposed to a single value defined in a standard feedback controller). Such a control law is advantageous as it allows the individual agents freedom in choosing their individual headings and motion speeds (from the specified set) during execution. This offers greater flexibility and robustness than traditional distributed feedback formation control laws. An alternative interpretation of the results presented is that the control law presented is capable of handling measurements that may be corrupted by an unknown finite state Markov chain (which can model noisy sensors and/or communication channels). A strong convergence result is established which permits global exponential convergence of the formation to the desired shape. © 2013 IEEE.

Nguyen, J, Su, SW & Nguyen, HT 2013, 'Experimental Study on a Smart Wheelchair System using a Combination of Stereoscopic and Spherical Vision', Proceedings of the 35th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, IEEE, Osaka, Japan, pp. 4597-4600.
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This paper is concerned with the experimental study performance of a smart wheelchair system named TIM (Thought-controlled Intelligent Machine), which uses a unique camera configuration for vision. Included in this configuration are stereoscopic cameras for 3-Dimensional (3D) depth perception and mapping ahead of the wheelchair, and a spherical camera system for 360-degrees of monocular vision. The camera combination provides obstacle detection and mapping in unknown environments during real-time autonomous navigation of the wheelchair. With the integration of hands-free wheelchair control technology, designed as control methods for people with severe physical disability, the smart wheelchair system can assist the user with automated guidance during navigation. An experimental study on this system was conducted with a total of 10 participants, consisting of 8 able-bodied subjects and 2 tetraplegic (C-6 to C-7) subjects. The hands-free control technologies utilized for this testing were a head-movement controller (HMC) and a braincomputer interface (BCI). The results showed the assistance of TIMs automated guidance system had a statistically significant reduction effect (p-value = 0.000533) on the completion times of the obstacle course presented in the experimental study, as compared to the test runs conducted without the assistance of TIM.

Nguyen, L, Nguyen, V, Ling, SS & Nguyen, HT 2013, 'Analyzing EEG Signals under Insulin-induced Hypoglycemia in Type 1 Diabetes Patients', Proceedings of the 35th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, IEEE, Osaka, Japan, pp. 1980-1983.
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Hypoglycemia is dangerous and considered as a limiting factor of the glycemic control therapy for patients with type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM). Nocturnal hypoglycemia is especially feared because early warning symptoms are unclear during sleep so an episode of hypoglycemia may lead to a fatal effect on patients. The main objective of this paper is to explore the correlation between hypoglycemia and electroencephalography (EEG) signals. To do this, the EEG of five T1DM adolescents from an overnight insulin-induced study is analyzed by spectral analysis to extract four different parameters. We aim to explore the response of these parameters during the clamp study which includes three main phases of normal, hypoglycemia and recovery. We also look at data at the blood glucose level (BGL) of 3.3-3.9 mmol/l to find a threshold to distinguish between non-hypoglycemia and hypoglycemia states. The results show that extracted EEG parameters are highly correlated with patients' conditions during the study. It is also shown that at the BGL of 3.3 mmol/l, responses to hypoglycemia in EEG signals start to significantly occur.

Nguyen, L, Nguyen, V, Ling, SS & Nguyen, HT 2013, 'Combining Genetic Algorithm and Levenberg-Marquardt Algorithm in Training Neural Network for Hypoglycemia Detection using EEG Signals', Proceedings of the 35th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, IEEE, Osaka, Japan, pp. 5386-5389.
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Hypoglycemia is the most common but highly feared complication induced by the intensive insulin therapy in patients with type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM). Nocturnal hypoglycemia is dangerous because sleep obscures early symptoms and potentially leads to severe episodes which can cause seizure, coma, or even death. It is shown that the hypoglycemia onset induces early changes in electroencephalography (EEG) signals which can be detected non-invasively. In our research, EEG signals from five T1DM patients during an overnight clamp study were measured and analyzed. By applying a method of feature extraction using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and classification using neural networks, we establish that hypoglycemia can be detected efficiently using EEG signals from only two channels. This paper demonstrates that by implementing a training process of combining genetic algorithm and Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm, the classification results are improved markedly up to 75% sensitivity and 60% specificity on a separate testing set.

Nguyen, L, Su, SW & Nguyen, HT 2013, 'Effects of Hyperglycemia on Variability of RR, QT, and Corrected QT Intervals in Type 1 Diabetic Patients', Proceedings of the 35th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, IEEE, Osaka, Japan, pp. 1819-1822.
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In this study, we evaluated the effects of hyperglycemia on the variability of RR (HRV), QT interval variability (QTV) and corrected QT interval variability (QTcV) during hyperglycemic and non-hyperglycemic conditions in six Type 1 diabetic patients at nights. The aim of this study was to investigate the association of high blood glucose levels with autonomic modulation of heart rate and variation in ventricular repolarization. Blood glucose level (BGL) threshold for defining hyperglycemia state was set at 8.33 mmol/l. Variability of RR, QT and corrected QT intervals during hyperglycemic and non-hyperglycemic were quantified using time and frequency domain measures. Hypomon® device was used to monitor ECG signals and acquire RR and QT intervals in Type 1 diabetic patients overnight. The results indicated that time and frequency domain HRV variables were significantly decreased under hyperglycemic condition and inversely correlated with BGL. QTV parameters also reduced when BGL increased and time domain measures of QTV were inversely associated with BGL. Variability in QTc interval was much less than in the QT interval and demonstrated a lower SDNN and LF power. We concluded that certain components of HRV, time-domain measures of QTV and QTc but not QTcV are strongly correlated to high blood glucose levels and can be good markers to identify hyperglycemic events in T1DM.

Nguyen, V, Nguyen, L, Su, SW & Nguyen, HT 2013, 'Shared Control Strategies for Human-Machine Interface in an Intelligent Wheelchair', Proceedings of the 35th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, IEEE, Osaka, Japan, pp. 3638-3641.
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In this paper, we introduce a shared control mechanism for an intelligent wheelchair designed to support people with mobility impairments, who also have visual, upper limb, or cognitive impairment. The method is designed to allow users to be involved in the movement as much as possible, while still providing the assistance needed to achieve the goal safely. The data collected through URG-04LX and user interface are analyzed to determine whether the desired action is safe to perform. The system then decides to provide assistance or to allow the user input to control the wheelchair. The experiment results indicate that the method performs effectively with high satisfaction.

Nguyen, V, Nguyen, L, Su, SW & Nguyen, HT 2013, 'The Advancement of an Obstacle Avoidance Bayesian Neural Network for an Intelligent Wheelchair', Proceedings of the 35th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, IEEE, Osaka, Japan, pp. 3642-3645.
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In this paper, an advanced obstacle avoidance system is developed for an intelligent wheelchair designed to support people with mobility impairments who also have visual, upper limb, or cognitive impairment. To avoid obstacles, immediate environment information is continuously updated with range data sampled by an on-board laser range finder URG-04LX. Then, the data is transformed to find the relevant information to the navigating process before being presented to a trained obstacle avoidance neural network which is optimized under the supervision of a Bayesian framework to find its structure and weight values. The experiment results showed that this method allows the wheelchair to avoid collisions while simultaneously navigating through an unknown environment in real-time. More importantly, this new approach significantly enhances the performance of the system to pass narrow openings such as door passing.

San, P, Ling, SS & Nguyen, HT 2013, 'Combinational neural logic system and its industrial application on hypoglycemia monitoring system', IEEE Conference on Industrial Electronics and Applications, IEEE Conference on Industrial Electronics and Applications, IEEE, Melbourne, Australia, pp. 947-952.
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In this paper, a combinational neural logic network (NLN) with the neural-Logic-AND, -OR and -NOT gates is applied on the development of non-invasive hypoglycemia monitoring system. It is an alarm system which measured physiological parameters of electrocardiogram (ECG) signal and determine the onset of hypoglycemia by use of proposed NLN. Due to different nature of application, conventional neural networks (NNs) with common structure may not always guarantee the optimal solution. Based on knowledge of application, the proposed NLN is designed systematically in order to incorporate the characteristics of application into the structure of proposed network. The parameter of the proposed NLN will be trained by hybrid particle swarm optimization with wavelet mutation (HPSOWM). The proposed NLN will be practically analyzed using real data sets collected from 15 children (569 data sets) with Type 1 diabetes at the Department of Health, Government of Western Australia. By using the proposed method, the detection performance is enhanced. Compared with other conventional NNs, the proposed NLN gives better performance in terms of sensitivity and specificity.

Su, SW, Savkin, A, Celler, BG & Nguyen, HT 2013, 'A new unconditional stability criterion and its application on decentralized integral controllability analysis', Proceedings of the 32nd Chinese Control Conference (CCC), Chinese Control Conference, IEEE, Xi'an, China, pp. 119-122.
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Decentralized integral control, such as multi-loop PI/PID control, is one of the most popular control strategies used in practice. An important issue associated with this strategy is the analysis of Decentralized Integral Controllability (DIC). Campo and Morari showed that for a process, if its steady state gain matrix is not critically D-stable, its DIC can be determined by using its steady state gain matrix only. This paper investigates decentralized integral control with a special focus on the DIC analysis of processes whose steady state gain matrices are critically D-stable. Firstly, this paper proposes a new unconditional stability criterion by using singular perturbation theory and eigenvalue sensitivity analysis, and shows that DIC analysis of such processes can be simplified by using unconditional stability analysis. Then, we presented a multi-loop PI control design method, which gives an explicit low bound of the proportional coefficient to achieve decentralized unconditional stability for 3 × 3 processes.

Warkiani, ME, Khoo, BL, Tan, DSW, Bhagat, AAS, Lim, WT, Han, J & Lim, CT 2013, 'Circulating tumor cell (CTC) enrichment: Ultra high throughput processing of clinically relevant blood volumes using a multiplexed spiral biochip', 17th International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences, MicroTAS 2013, pp. 1156-1158.
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Detection and characterization of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from minimally invasive "liquid biopsy" provides critical insights into tumor biology and is critical for companion diagnostics and care. Here, we present a multiplexed spiral biochip for ultra-high throughput isolation of CTCs using inertial microfluidics to realize a single step label-free enrichment process. This device is capable of efficient cell separation of clinically relevant blood volumes in a short period of time (7.5 mL blood in 35 min). CTCs were successfully detected and isolated from 100% (50/50) blood samples collected from patients with advanced stage metastatic breast and lung cancer. They were identified under immunofluorescence assays (cytokeratin positive), as well as molecular probes (EGFR or HER2 positive). CTC recovery rate ranges from 3-1535 CTCs/mL and obtained under high purity (1 CTC for every 30-100 white blood cells detected). Retrieved cells are unlabelled and hence more viable for propagation, drug development and other downstream analysis.

Yuwono, M, Su, SW, Moulton, BD & Nguyen, HT 2013, 'Unsupervised segmentation of heel-strike IMU dtata using rapid cluster estimation of wavelet features', Proceedings of the 35th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, IEEE, OSaka, Japan, pp. 953-956.
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When undertaking gait-analysis, one of the most important factors to consider is heel-strike (HS). Signals from a waist worn Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) provides sufficient accelerometric and gyroscopic information for estimating gait parameter and identifying HS events. In this paper we propose a novel adaptive, unsupervised, and parameter-free identification method for detection of HS events during gait episodes. Our proposed method allows the device to learn and adapt to the profile of the user without the need of supervision. The algorithm is completely parameter-free and requires no prior fine tuning. Autocorrelation features (ACF) of both anteroposterior acceleration (aAP) and medio-lateral acceleration (aML) are used to determine cadence episodes. The Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) features of signal peaks during cadence are extracted and clustered using Swarm Rapid Centroid Estimation (Swarm RCE). Left HS (LHS), Right HS (RHS), and movement artifacts are clustered based on intra-cluster correlation. Initial pilot testing of the system on 8 subjects show promising results up to 84.3%9.2% and 86.7%6.9% average accuracy with 86.8%9.2% and 88.9%7.1% average precision for the segmentation of LHS and RHS respectively.

Zhou, J, Guo, A, xu, J, Su, SW & Celler, BG 2013, 'A reliable medium access mechanism based on priorities for wireless body sensor networks', Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), 2013 35th Annual International Conference of the IEEE, International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, IEEE, Osaka, Japan, pp. 1855-1858.
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Wireless body sensor networks (WBSN) provide health related information for monitoring or professional analysis by collecting various signals of human body or environment information with sensors. But different data acquired in many applications have different transmission requirements. The dropping of life-critical messages could possibly create life threatening results if the network is not reliable. To improve the reliability this paper proposes a novel reliable medium access mechanism (RMAM) which guarantees transmission of data with different priorities in less delay and energy consumption. The mechanism is designed and evaluated by Castalia. The improved performances of latency, packets breakdown and energy consumption are analyzed and depicted with comparison.

Ajuyah, PA, Hutvagner, GH & Tran, NT 2013, 'miRNAs promote migration in oral cancer by targeting PDCD4'.

Brennan, SB, Tran, NT, Clayton, AC & Martiniello-Wilks, RMW 2013, 'Noncoding RNA in Prostate Cancer Exosomes:Offering novel Circualting Biomarkersfor Early Cancer Diagnosis and Prognosis'.

Khoury, SK & Tran, NT 2013, 'Absolute quantitation of microRNA levels in oral cancers and their utility as biomarkers for early detection'.

Khoury, SK, Clark, JC, Elliott, ME & Tran, NT 2013, 'Circulating non-coding RNAs as Biomarkers of Head and Neck Cancers'.
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Background: Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma (HNSCC) is the 6th common malignancy in men. We currently have little understanding of the molecular events of this disease and no biomarkers currently exist for early detection. Recently, small non-coding RNAs such as microRNAs (miRNAs) were shown to be highly stable and could be found in body fluids such as serum. Given this, circulating miRNAs found in the blood of HNSCC patients could act as potential clinical biomarkers for early detection. Methods: Using Agilent miRNA arrays we screened for the expression of circulating miRNAs in patient sera (n=52) showing the four representative subtypes of HNSCC and in sera isolated from normal individuals (n=11). A number of candidate miRNAs biomarkers were identified and validated using TaqMan qPCR. These biomarkers were then assessed for clinical relevance. Results: Ninety-three dysregulated serum miRNAs were identified across all tumours in comparison to healthy sera. Specifically 166 serum miRNAs were deregulated in oral SCC serum, 22 in hypopharyngeal cancers and 34 in the oropharyngeal cohort. Unsupervised hierarchical clustering and principal component analysis indicated that sera profiles could clearly distinguish between HNSCC and control samples. A selection of these miRNAs was then validated using singleplex TaqMan qPCR. Conclusions: Our study is the first to show that the expression levels of serum miRNAs can distinguish four different subtypes of HNSCC. QPCR analysis supported these findings with further studies now being validated in a larger cohort of clinical samples. Our findings provide a promising foundation for the application of small RNAs as biomarkers for the early detection of HNSCC.