Elzbieta Slubowska
MEASUREMENT OF HANDWRITING TREMOR FOR DIAGNOSTIC PURPOSES

Spectral analysis of the tremor signals got from the movement of the writing hand is presented in this paper. Analysis of stylus position and velocity is made upon data collected from the computer system for handwriting analyses, developed in Institute of Precision and Biomedical Engineering Warsaw University of Technology. Volunteers drew the circles on the digitiser surface using electronic pen similar to a normal ballpoint pen. Presented analyses were obtained from the group of 31 participants aged from 21 to 60 with different spectral analysis results of tremor measurements. Some of analyses were chosen to show differences between person without troubles in handwriting and that one whose handwriting is not easily readable because of some troubles with motorical skills or some diseases with pathological tremor, for example Parkinson's disease. As a results of my research I presented the method to classify the spectrum analyses for characteristic tremor group using numerical parameters.

Elisabeth Costa Monteiro, Carlos Hall Barbosa, Raul Hernández Tabares, Cassio Scheffer, Raul Queiroz Feitosa
A LOW-COST ELECTROCARDIOGRAPH INTEGRATED WITH A MULTIMEDIA AND AUTOMATIC ANALYSIS SYSTEM

This paper presents a computerised low-cost electrocardiograph system for application in low-income communities. The system hardware is connected to the serial port of an IBM-PC microcomputer, and integrated with a multimedia software, which controls the acquisition process, manages patient data, provides information on heart disease prevention, and performs an automatic analysis of the electrocardiogram signals. The main objective is to provide a screening diagnosis of patients with heart diseases, forwarding them to a specialist to further analyses.

Walter Wild, Sebastian R. Schütte, Hans W. Pau, Burkhard Kramp, Tino Just
INFRARED THERMOGRAPHY AS A NON INVASIVE APPLICATION FOR MEDICAL DIAGNOSTIC

From 4 examples from the human medicine it is described how the application of IR-thermography can be applied as a non invasive measuring method advantageously for the diagnosis and therapy as well as for the installation of artificial cochlea-implants, screw connection of broken bones, observation of tissue violations by warning shot weapons and the recognition of vessel illnesses of legs and feet.

Du-Yih Tsai, Katsuyuki Kojima
WAVELET COEFFICIENT MAPPING FOR ENHANCEMENT OF CHEST X-RAY IMAGES

An approach to image enhancement of digital chest radiographs is described. The method is to employ various non-linear mapping functions to different scale levels at the transform domain. The mapping functions are used to project a set of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) coefficients to a new set of DWT coefficients. The mapped coefficients are then inverse wavelet transformed. Our preliminary results strongly suggest that the proposed method offers considerably improved enhancement capability over the fast Fourier transform method and the conventional DWT method.

Artur Przelaskowski
NUMERICAL EQUIVALENT OF ACCURACY AS A MEASURE OF MEDICAL IMAGE QUALITY

The objective of this study is a proposition for a new vector measure of image quality reflecting diagnostic accuracy. The formation of a diagnostic quality pattern (DQP) was based on the subjective ratings of image local features, playing an essential role in the detection and classification of any lesion. The pattern was used for more reliable calculation of a single number - the equivalent of diagnostically related image quality. The equivalent was constructed with a criterion of the highest correlation with approximated diagnostic accuracy of compressed images. Experimental results contain the opinions of 9 radiologists: 2 test designers and 7 observers who rated digital mammograms. The correlation coefficient between the numerical equivalent of the vector measure and subjective rates is over 0.9.