Delivery of Health Care: CITRIS Projects

Healthcare is a $2 Trillion/year industry which amounts to 16% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product. These numbers are expected to rapidly rise as the aging baby boomers will continue to increase the elderly age group population (people above 60 years of age) from the current 10% level to the 25% level in 2030. While the advances in hardware and software technologies for healthcare services have been remarkable, networking remains as the main hurdle in delivering much needed modern healthcare services in a timely and cost-effective manner.

 

One of the most basic yet powerful tools in all of medicine is the simple microscope. It is the first tool of evaluation for skin diseases, ear aches, and sore throats, as well as being central to diagnosis of blood diseases. However, only the discerning eye of a trained physician can filter images and provide effective diagnoses and treatment recommendations. We propose to link high-resolution microscopic imaging with clinical expertise through microscopy-enabled cell phones.

In Malaysia around 40,000 people suffer from stroke every year. At least one-fourth of stroke survivors experience aphasia, a communication impairment that varies considerably across patients but most involves some form of deficit in language comprehension. Language rehabilitation, especially when it is intense (8-10 hours/week for 12 weeks) and it starts early (after the patient's medical condition has stabilized, often within 24 to 48 hours after the stroke, preferably in acute-care hospitals), has been shown to be beneficial in

The burden of infectious diseases is very high in developing countries. World-wide, nearly 1 million die annually from malaria, 2.9 million from enteric (intestinal) infections, 4.3 million from respiratory infections, and 5 million from AIDS and tuberculosis. Unfortunately, most methods for diagnosing these diseases are invasive, labor intensive, and sometimes inadequate. Furthermore, they require laboratory equipment and infrastructure that are not typically found in remote/resource-limited areas. Thus,

The burden of infectious diseases is very high in developing countries. World-wide, nearly 1 million die annually from malaria, 2.9 million from enteric (intestinal) infections, 4.3 million from respiratory infections, and 5 million from AIDS and tuberculosis. Unfortunately, most methods for diagnosing these diseases are invasive, labor intensive, and sometimes inadequate. Furthermore, they require laboratory equipment and infrastructure that are not typically found in remote/resource-limited areas. Thus,

Doctors currently diagnose many neurological diseases by observing the gait of a patient; however, many patients feel uncomfortable in the medical surroundings and do not behave naturally. To remove this obstacle to diagnose, CITRIS researchers are developing an automated diagnostic system that will enable various gait and movement disorders to be quantitatively characterized. This system, which measures inertia, will allow patients to collect information at their home and at other locations that reflect their daily routine.

The BioPOETS (Biomolecular Polymer Opto-Electronic Technology and Science) group is focusing on quantum nanoplasmonics, microfluidic BASICs (Biological Application Specific Integrated Circuits), soft-state biological devices, and BioPOEMS (Biomolecular-Polymer-Opto-Electro-Mechanical-Systems) for the digitalization of quantitative systems biology and molecular medicine.

Future biomedical implants with extended wireless connectivity will form the bottom layer of a future intelligent health care delivery infrastructure. In addition to providing therapy through electrical stimulation and drug delivery, implants will provide uploading diagnostic information to clinicians and downloading of customized therapeutic algorithms to enable personalized medicine.

"Point-cloud" or "scattered-data" visualization is becoming increasingly important in new emerging applications, especially in sensor network data analysis. Advances in wireless sensor networks are producing more and more data at random points in space and time that must be processed to make possible meaningful three-dimensional visualization, possibly changing with time depending on the specific phenomenon being monitored. Typical variables that can be monitored with sensor networks are temperature, humidity, and light intensity.

The University of California at Berkeley has been given a grant to design,prototype, implement and evaluate a new search system for bioscience literature. There are significant components of the project that deal with processing of language as it is naturally spoken or written, the design of the search screen and how it works, as well as basic database design and implementation.

The BioPOEMS (Bio-Polymer-Opto-Electro-Mechanical-Systems) group at UC Berkeley will investigate and develop the polymer optical materials and processing technology required to achieve a highly variable field-of-view (FOV) optical element on the microsystems using advanced MEMS.

The overall goal of this work is to develop the capability to create platforms with a small array that will be able to sense and identify a wide range of chemicals using real-time measurements to determine both the dynamics of biomolecular reactions as well as quantitative differences in binding characteristics. The specific goals of this proposal are to develop and understand the physiochemical mechanisms of a nanogap dielectric biosensor that has recently been demonstrated at BSAC.

Due to the improvements in performance in computer power and storage capacity achieved over the last decade, today's data-intensive scientific applications and simulations are capable of generating massive amounts of data. Sensor networks will soon consist of thousands of (possibly moving) sensors, distributed in a three- dimensional (3D) environment and recording multiple parameters. Standard visualization techniques are not capable to render the huge data sets at interactive frame rates.

RESEARCH THRUSTS:
An interdisciplinary approach will be taken and the multi-facetted research of COINS will focus on molecular and nanometer level mechanics at the interface of hard and soft matter. COINS will have five thrusts centering on an "element-to-device-to-system" research strategy:
(I) Key Nanomechanical Building Blocks;
(II) Theoretical Simulation of Nanomechanics;
(III) Mechanical Behavior of Nanostructure Elements;
(IV) Instrumentations for Nanomechanical Measurements;
(V) Nanomechanical System Integration.

The promise of bioengineering to improve millions of lives will require efficient production and supply chain logistics systems that can manufacture and deliver millions of high quality, low cost products to patients. The objective of this project is to study how industrial engineering and operations research (IEOR) tools for designing such systems can be applied to biomanufacturing, and to establish a research agenda so that current IEOR tools can be modified, and new tools can be developed, to improve bioproduction systems efficiency.

The research funded under this grant is to determine how to create a rapid prototyping system which can automatically combine millimeter-size links and joints with actuators, sensors, and wiring, using kits of component parts and a novel low-cost assembly system. Identification and design of a minimal sufficient set of uncured composite-fiber millirobot components will be explored. The problem of flexible wiring around joints will be addressed using thin laminations of copper foil and polymers.

Many software security issues cannot be addressed without a specification defining what security means. This project investigates secure API's and disciplined styles of programming that reduce the likelihood of security flaws and combines two related efforts: first, development of specification languages that enhance security without much cost to programmers, and second, tools that enforce these disciplines, such as the efficient insertion of security monitors into existing programs.

We propose a novel, portable, integrated confocal nanofluidic SERS for proteomics. It will combine the high-resolution confocal detection with the localized nanofluidic biochemical detection via Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS). The stand-alone device comprises a 2D nanofluidic protein chip, scanning microlenses for confocal imaging, and a microspectrometer for Raman analysis.

We propose to develop and study Collaborative Telepresence, a technology motivated by the appeal of "liveness" in sports, music, and theater that will allow users to not only view live remote events, but to collectively participate in them. Collaborative Telepresence requires hardware, software, and new interfaces that will allow audience members to interact with each other and with the remote environment. With new interfaces and system architectures, users can intuitively share control of a remote camera, robot, or skilled human "Tele-Actor".

The long term goal of this work is to harness the effect of bevel tip needle bending to provide accurate, dexterous targeting for percutaneous therapies. New results in needle and tissue modeling, combined with robot motion modeling, will facilitate new models, hardware, control, and planning techniques for steering exible needles inside soft tissue.

Task 1: Next Generation Network Architecture and Protocol Studies
Berkeley team, together with Davis team, will design next generation network architectures and protocols, and conduct comparative simulation studies on the designed protocols and architectures in terms of performance, robustness, and scalability. The studies will pay special attention to performance and robustness across heterogeneous networks (optical, wireline, wireless mobile layers) supporting emerging new services (realtime video applications, multimedia, and high-capacity data exchange).

Robotic Telesurgical Workstation for Laparoscopy Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) is a revolutionary approach in surgery. In MIS, the operation is performed with instruments and viewing equipment inserted into the body through small incisions created by the surgeon, in contrast to open surgery with large incisions. This minimizes surgical trauma and damage to healthy tissue, resulting in shorter patient recovery time. Unfortunately, there are disadvantages due to the reduced dexterity, workspace, and sensory input to the surgeon, which is only available through a single video image.

This action is to support the installation of a vertical seismic array on the UC Berkeley campus. Two instrumented boreholes will be installed on either side of the Hayward Fault. Each borehole will consist of 3-component accelerometer units, a rate gyroscope, magnetometer, and pore pressure sensor. The sensors will be an array of MEMS-based devices, including an all-digital 24-bit accelerometer. The sensors will be incorporated into an intelligent networked sensor Mote.

During the fiscal year 2003, the focus of this project is threefold, described as follows:
Simulation Framework

We developed a semi-automatic technique for segmenting a large cryo-sliced human brain data set that contains 753 high-resolution RGB color images. This human brain data set presents a number of unique challenges to segmentation and visualization due to its size (over 7 GB) as well as the fact that each image not only shows the current slice of the brain but also unsliced "deeper layers" of the brain. These challenges are not present in traditional MRI and CT data sets.

Due to the improvements in performance in computer power and storage capacity achieved over the last decade, today's data-intensive scientific applications and simulations are capable of generating massive amounts of data. Sensor networks will soon consist of thousands of (possibly moving) sensors, distributed in a three- dimensional (3D) environment and recording multiple parameters. Standard visualization techniques are not capable to render the huge data sets at interactive frame rates.

Exploration and visualization of large volumetric data sets is a challenging problem that arises when analyzing results from simulation or scanning procedures. Often, the data is stored on a three-dimensional rectilinear grid like, for example, (bio-) medical imaging data or numerically simulated time-dependent hydrodynamics data. A powerful tool for visualization of three-dimensional data is a slicer that renders planes, which cut the volumetric data domain in arbitrary direction. The position and orientation of the cutting plane can be modified interactively to explore the whole data set.

We define a "collaborative telerobot" as a telerobot simultaneously controlled by many participants, where input from each participant is combined to generate a single control stream.Collaborative Telerobotics (CT) is a highly innovative approach to teleimmersion and teleworking. With CT, participants collaborate rather than compete for access to valuable resources such as historical and scientific sites. A scalable infrastructure for CT, compatible with the Internet, would allow large groups of students or researchers to simultaneously

The networked sensor regime is an exciting new design space that is emerging as a result of innovations in RF Communication technology and MEMS technology. TinyOS explores the software support that is required in that design space. TinyOS is a component-based runtime environment designed to provide support for deeply embedded systems, which require concurrency intensive operations while constrained by minimal hardware resources. For example, originally designed for the Smart Dust hardware platform, our scheduler fits in under 200 bytes of program memory.

The goal is to develop a platform for NEST research to accelerate the development of algorithms, services, and their composition into applications. Most of the platform is software; small, networked sensor nodes are developed to ground algorithmic work in the reality of working with numerous, highly constrained devices.
The main elements of the proposed approach are a comprehensive platform consisting of:
> The hardware required for low-cost large-scale
experimentation

An Interactive Sensor Networks (ISN) is a distributed sensor and communication system where two things obtain: Some data processing is done at the sensor node location before being sent to the main processing location; and, the processing done at the sensor node location is configurable by the specific user in real time, to save system resources as well as make the output the user receives more friendly. Work performed in this project will consist of designing interactive sensor nodes, building the nodes, setting up a distributed system, and characterizing and testing.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is sponsoring a program for Nano Mechanical Array Signal Processors (NMASP). The key focus of this program is on optimized combinations of innovative solutions in micro or nano fabrication, materials processing, device design, transduction mechanism, interconnects, and other relevant engineering approaches that directly address the performance issues in high-Q UHF mechanical resonator arrays for RF transceiver and signal processor applications.

There has been intensive research focused on the development of an electronic replacement for the ubiquitous UPC barcode. To replace consumer barcodes, ultra-low cost will be paramount. Organic based circuits may enable this due to their low fabrication cost. In this work, the investigators will develop the technologies necessary for RFID barcode replacement systems, and will use these to demonstrate a major subcomponent of any RFID system - the power harvesting subcircuit.

Temperature strongly affects output power and peak wavelength characteristics of active optoelectronic devices. In this paper we describe how thermoreflectance imaging technique can be used to obtain thermal maps of photonic devices under operation. Submicron spatial resolution and <0.1C temperature resolution has been achieved. Temperature non-uniformity is investigated in various multi section lasers and photonic integrated circuits. It is shown that large temperature variations can be developed over small regions on the order of 20-30 micrometers in diameter.

I. Sub-10 nm Silicon-Based FETs
A. Double-Gate FETs
(1) Develop self-aligned double-gate FinFETs with special attention to process simplification. Fabricate prototype devices to verify the device concept and investigate the characteristics of small double-gate CMOS devices. Demonstrate performance superior to bulk devices. Explore the impact on circuits through mixed-mode and SPICE
simulations.
B. Performance Enhanced FETs via New Materials and Fabrication Technologies

This project is pursuing studies on the architecture and protocol design, performance analysis, and experimentation of optical packet switching networks, targeting to achieve a high-performance optical-label switching (OLS) system in the core (fast core) with an intelligent traffic management at the edge (smart edge).

Dramatic theoretical advances in the field of Quantum Information Sciences over the past seven years have led to increasing pressure for physical realization of true quantum devices that can be operated coherently to provide reversible quantum logic. Such devices are required for novel communication and computing schemes exploiting quantum mechanical effects. Although enormous strides have been made in developing algorithms, quantum codes, and powerful cryptographic protocols, experimental implementation still poses some very difficult problems.

We propose a comprehensive research program for the realization of a novel all-optical memory with a storage length that can be adjusted via an external control. An all-optical memory is a critical building block for optical communications and signal processing. Such a device must have a storage that can be externally varied with a rapid response time. Thus far, there have been no such devices reported in spite of intense research in the field.