Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Introduction
With the advent of the twenty-first century, the focus on global health and
personal well-being has increased. In 2006, the population of the Earth was
estimated to be 6.5 billion,
∗
which is expected to rise steadily in the coming
years. Health has become more important with recent advances in genetic
research, development of new and improved drugs, diagnosis of disease, and
the design of more advanced systems for patient monitoring. Health now ranks
as one of the most important needs in modern society as evidenced by increas-
ing government funding around the globe.
In this opening chapter we examine the fundamental components of a
biomedical system, ranging from the medical data to the instrumentation
that can be used to diagnose a disorder. The vast amount of data collected
has resulted in increasingly extensive databases, which cannot always be e-
ciently interpreted by clinicians or doctors, resulting in excessive waiting times
for a patient to be diagnosed. The problem is exacerbated by the shortage of
qualified medical staff causing unnecessary delays, which can be exceptionally
fatal to patients with serious disorders. Consequently, recent research issues
have focused on new and improved diagnostic methods to alleviate the risk of
life loss due to inadequate diagnostic capacity.
A new paradigm in the field of medicine is computational intelligence (CI) for
diagnostic systems. Computational intelligence is a combination of advances
in artificial learning and computers, which was introduced more than five
decades ago. These techniques are extremely valuable for interpreting large
volumes of data and have been successfully applied to pattern recognition
and function estimation problems. In short, CI techniques provide a possible
solution to the growing need for automated diagnostic systems. In the fol-
lowing chapters, we will examine the fundamentals of automated biomedical
diagnostic systems and highlight the areas in which CI techniques have been
successfully employed.
