Biomedical Engineering for A Better Life

This special issue contains a selection of interesting contribution from academia. Partly of the articles that have been presented in the In the first article, Biosensor Based on Giant Magnetoresistance Material, Djamal et al. demonstrate a comprehensive review on novel approach in biosensor based on GMR material. Compared with the traditional optical detection that widely used in biomedicine, GMR sensors are more sensitive, portable and give a fully electronic readout. In addition, GMR sensor is inexpensive and the fabrication is compatible with the current VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) technology, so GMR sensors can be easily integrated with electronics and microfluidics to detect many different analytes on a single chip. In the second article, Non-Compactness Attribute Filtering to Extract Retinal Blood Vessels in Fundus Images, I. K. E. Purnama et al. propose a new method consisting of a sequence of procedures to segment blood vessels in a retinal image. In the method, attribute filtering with a so-called Max-Tree is used to represent the image based on its gray value. The filtering process is done using the branches filtering approach in which the tree branches are selected based on the non-compactness of the nodes. The selection is started from the leaves. This experiment was done to 40 retinal images, and utilizes the manual segmentation created by an observer to validate the results. The proposed method can deliver the average accuracy of 94.21%. The third article, An Improved Olympic Hole-Filling Method for Ultrasound Volume Reconstruction of Human Spine, Dewi et al. propose an improved Olympic operator for Hole-filling algorithm, and apply it to generate the volume in freehand 3D ultrasound reconstruction of the spine. The conventional Olympic operator defines the empty voxels by sorting the neighboring voxels, removing the n% of the upper and lower values, and averaging them to attain the value to fill the empty voxels. The empty voxel estimation can be improved by thresholding the range width of its neighboring voxels and adjusting it to the average values. The method is tested on a hole-manipulated volume derived from a cropped 3D ultrasound volume of a part of the spine. The proposed technique shows improved result compared to all tested existing methods.