The Inaugural ceremony of FDP, started with a silent prayer in the Conference hall at 10:30 am on 3rd May 2010. Welcome speech was delivered by Prof. Ms. Asha Panicker, Head of the Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering, RSET. The workshop was officially inaugurated by Dr. Padmakumar Medical Director, Sunrise Hospital. Dr. J Isaac Principal, RSET delivered the presidential address. A course material for the FDP was also released by Dr. Padmakumar, Dr. J Isaac & Dr. A C Mathai, Professor Emeritus, RSET. Mr. Parameshwaran, IETE Chairman Kochi Chapter and Dr C Karthikeyan, Professor, DEC, RSET felicitated the gathering. Ms Liza Annie Joseph coordinator of the workshop delivered the vote of thanks. The inaugural function was over by 11:15 am.
Following the inauguration, Dr. Padmakumar, medical director of the sunrise hospital, delivered the keynote address on ‘Advanced Biomedical Equipment & Treatment Outcome’. Dr Padmakumar with his rich experience in laparoscopy always tries to integrate the traditional diagnostic system with the upgraded technologies for the welfare of mankind.
He also discussed the importance of integrating the medical science and engineering to obtain high quality solution. During his talk he has given an insight of various advanced biomedical instruments used for diagnostics in the sunrise hospital.
There was a need to connect the audience to the application of Digital Signal Processing, so in the after noon seession, Prof Asha Panicker, HOD, ECE, RSET mainly discussed about the areas where mostly DSP is used and also discussed its application in various domains.
On 4th May, Mr Jaison Jacob,AP, ECE, RSET included the following topics like, the fields that use Digital Image Processing, Fundamental steps in digital image processing, Digital Image representation and Image enhancement. The basic knowledge enlightened the participants in the field of image processing.
Following the topics, a lab session for discussing the tools for Medical imaging in Matlab was taken by Ms Biji C.L & Ms Jisa David. The different functions available in image processing toolbox, programming of image enhancement techniques both in time and frequency domain have been covered in the lab session.
On 5th May, Dr Sreenadhan, AP, NSS college palakkad an expert in the field of Genomic signal processing discussed the relevance of signal processing in gene prediction. He even quoted a few examples in gene prediction diagnostics.
Following the first session Ms Liza Annie Joseph, AP, ECE, RSET gave an introduction to biomedical instrumentation. Discussed various physiological systems and basically covered the establishment of a vital link for man machine instrumentation.
AN, a visit was arranged to Sunrise hospital, where Dr Sreevalsan T.V, Consultant in critical care gave a detailed presentation of various critical care instruments. Following that Dr Vinod Thomas , a cardiologist briefed upon the catherization laboratory followed by a visit to have a detailed look into these installations.
On 6th May, Dr T Mahalakshmy, principal, SNIT kollam, inspired the entire gathering with her research experience in the field of bioinformatics. She gave an overview of genomic & proteomic signals. She even discussed the scope of wavelets in the computation of gene prediction. Following the first session, she even supported the delegates by simulating a matlab program for gene prediction.
AN, Dr Deepthy Menon, AIMS gave an insight of how nanotechnology be used for cancer diagnostics and also enriched the crowd with the scope of doing research in nanotechnology with her experience.
The last session for the day was about Noninvasive Diagnostics based on Photoplethysmographic signal by Dr Jayasree from MEC, Trikkakara.
On 7th May, Dr Achuth Sankar S Nair, a living legend in the field of bioinformatics gave an insight of fractality in bio sequences. He with his rich research experience emphasized the need for the passion of technical tools for solving a problem. He briefly discussed the importance of signal processing and later on the chaos theory and its application in bioinformatics.
In the afternoon, Ms Hema Ramachandran, AP, EEE, University College Kariyavattom gave hands on training to Sci lab, an open software which can be used for research simulations. Basic syntax and few image simulation programs have been covered during the session.
10th of May, FN, Dr. C. Kesavadas, an additional professor in radiology from SriChitra Tirunal Institute, Thiruvananthapuram, spoke on medical imaging from the perspective of a radiologist. Starting from the fundamentals of medical imaging, he discussed on the principles of X-ray imaging, computed tomography and MRI. Pixel, voxel, the memory requirements, the conventional CT, its shortfalls, the spiral CT, the multislice CT were all discussed at length. He even gave an introduction to PACS, the Picture archiving communication system needed for rapid access to historical images and the need for data compression. Transmission of image studies, tele-radiology which uses wide area and local area network, and digital image communication, DICOM were also highlighted.
The afternoon session was dealt by Mr. Rajeev K., Principal Research Engineer, Network Systems & Technologies Pvt Ltd, Thiruvananthapuram. He discussed on various aspects which included the characteristics and imperfections in medical imaging and the challenges posed by higher dimensionalities.
On 11th May, Mr. Veenus K.V., the technical manager from NeST Technologies addressed the gathering with the introduction to Graphic Processing unit, the GPU which are parallel processors.
Mr. K. Rajeev continued the session speaking on Image denoising.
AN, first session was addressed by Ms. Harsha A. lecturer, RSET on Diabetic Retinopathy which highlighted Retinal Feature Extraction.
Following the first session Mr. Delson T. R., Lecturer, RSET gave an introduction to biometric security system which highlighted the use of biological traits for measurement and security purposes.
12th May, FN was on virtual instrumentation with relevance to biomedical instrument simulation. Mr. Nandisha from Trident Tech Labs gave an insight into the possibilities of virtual instrumentation as far as medical imaging is concerned.
AN session comprised of a hospital visit to Institute of radiation and Imaging Sciences, IRIS Kochi at the Indira Gandhi Cooperative Hospital Campus, Kadavanthra. The participants had the opportunity for a real time scanning procedure of an open MRI system and also CT scanning systems.
On the 13th May, FN session was handled by Dr. V.K. Sunderaraman, an MR specialist from Philips Healthcare, who is a radiologist by profession with a PhD in biomedical instrumentation. He discussed on the different kinds of modalities for medical imaging, emphasizing on the qualities of MR imaging and MR spectroscopy. The audience had the opportunity of the view of a few 3-D image reconstructions.
In the 2nd half of the day, a brief idea of 1-D signal processing through Electroencephalography was delivered by Ms. Minimol B., lecturer from Model Engineering College,. She also added that there is a lot of scope for research in this particular area, this being a non-invasive painless procedure.
The third session by Dr. Ajith Abraham from MIR labs, gave an insight to Nature inspired Computation.
On 14th May,FN handled by an expert in Digital signal processing, Dr. Jiji C.V. from College of Engineering Thiruvanthapuram. He conveyed the audience with the mathematical aspects of Computed Tomography. Step by step he discussed the fundamental aspects of signal processing, image processing and finally arrived at the mathematical formulation of computed Tomography.