BioE faculty, students attend large gathering of bioengineers in Germany

UIC Bioengineering faculty and students visit the 41st Annual Engineering in Medicine & Biology Conference 2019 in Berlin, Germany.

Members of the Richard and Loan Hill Bioengineering Department at UIC were recently networking, learning, and presenting their work at this year’s Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference in Berlin, Germany. The conference, one of the largest gatherings of bioengineers in the world, is an invaluable resource for cutting-edge information and innovation across the bioengineering field.

The 41st annual conference covered a wide range of topics from micro- and nano-tissue engineering, biomedical sensors and wearable systems, bio-robotics, signal processing, health informatics, and cardiovascular and respiratory systems engineering.

The UIC team attended scientific sessions, listened to keynote speakers, discovered new biomedical companies, start-ups, and biomedical institutes, and networked with others researching biomedical engineering.

One of those team members was PhD student Martina Guidetti, who presented her latest research on Magnetic Resonance Elastography performed on anisotropic samples at the MRE mini symposium.

“We are developing an innovative technique to describe shear wave propagation in anisotropic media called Transformation Elastography,” Guidetti said. “This method could open the way for new approaches in the MRE inversion techniques for anisotropic tissues analysis.”

Another bioengineering student who attended the conference was PhD candidate Biswajit Maharathi, who presented his work on epileptic brain connectivity and its relationship with brain structure.

Maharathi noted he has been to several large bioengineering conferences in the past and always appreciates that they provide an opportunity to get exposure to new research. The conferences also provided the chance to network with researchers from other universities and companies. Guidetti said she found a potential collaborator for her MRE work at a mini-symposium with a scientist based in Berlin.

“The science and engineering discussions are great. You also get a good exposure what other people are doing in the similar or other fields,” Maharathi said. “I would recommend to other PhD students to attend the conference, and specifically encourage them to present their work.”
The list of UIC activities at the conference included:

  • Dieter Klatt chaired the minisymposium titled “Magnetic Resonance Elastography: Quantification of Viscoelastic Parameters from Specimens to In-Vivo Organs.”
  • Jie Liang co-chaired an oral session titled “Modeling of Networks and Diseases.”
  • Biswajit Maharathi presented “Central Sulcus Is a Barrier to Causal Propagation in Epileptic Networks.” James Patton and Jeffrey Loeb both contributed to the research.
  • Rolf Otto Reiter presented “Review of MR Elastography Methodology and Future Directions for Data Acquisition and Processing.” Dieter Klatt also contributed to the research.
  • Martina Guidetti presented “Transformation Elastography: Reconstruction by Spatial Distortion to Convert Anisotropy and Inhomogeneity into Isotropy and Homogeneity.” Harish Palnitkar, Dieter Klatt and Thomas Royston all contributed to this research.
  • Rolf Otto Reiter presented “Prostate Cancer Assessment using Ex Vivo MR Elastography at 9.4 Tesla.” Majumdar Shreyan, Steven Kearny, Andre Kajdacsy-Balla, Virgilia Macias, Winnie Mar, Brandon Caldwell, Michael Abern and Dieter Klatt all contributed to the research.
  • Jie Liang presented “Sensitivities of Regulation Intensities in Feed-Forward Loops with Multistability.” Anna Terebus also contributed to the research.
  • Chiara Di Vece presented “GLOS: GLOve for Speech Recognition.” Giulia Crocioni and Hananeh Esmailbeigi both contributed to the research.
  • Zachary Wright contributed to the presentation “Post-Stroke Motor Deficits are most Evident at Frequencies Near 125 Hz in EMG Multivariate Probability Distributions.”