IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging.

Melanoma is the most serious form of skin cancer, with more than 123,000 new cases worldwide each year. Reliable automatic melanoma screening system will be a great help for clinicians to detect malignant skin lesions as soon as possible. To address this problem, a computer-assisted approach to detecting melanoma using convolutional neural networks will enable effective and faster treatment of the disease. Many attempts have been made to use convolutional neural networks to solve this problem, but so far the performance in this aspect is not good. In this project, Xception and VGG-16 models will be fine-tuned on the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) Official Skin Data Set 2016 and combined into an integrated framework to predict whether skin disease images are benign or malignant. Our experimental results show that the ensemble model can achieve better classification results and the proposed method is competitive in this field.

Recently, the incidence of skin cancer has increased considerably and is seriously threatening human health. Automatic detection of this disease, where early detection is critical to human life, is quite challenging. Factors such as undesirable residues (hair, ruler markers), indistinct boundaries, variable contrast, shape differences, and color differences in the skin lesion images make automatic analysis quite difficult. To overcome these challenges, a highly effective segmentation method based on a fully convolutional network (FCN) is presented in this paper. The proposed improved FCN (iFCN) architecture is used for the segmentation of full-resolution skin lesion images without any pre- or post-processing. It is to support the residual structure of the FCN architecture with spatial information. This situation, which creates a more advanced residual system, enables more precise detection of details on the edges of the lesion, and an analysis independent of skin color can be performed. It offers two contributions: determining the center of the lesion and clarifying the edge details despite the undesirable effects. Two publicly available datasets, the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) 2017 Challenge and PH2 datasets, are used to evaluate the performance of the iFCN method. The mean Jaccard index is 78.34%, the mean Dice score is 88.64%, and the mean accuracy value is 95.30% for the proposed method for the ISBI 2017 test dataset. Furthermore, the mean Jaccard index is 87.1%, the mean Dice score is 93.02%, and the mean accuracy value is 96.92% for the proposed method for the PH2 test dataset.

Tracking subcellular structures as well as viral structures displayed as 'particles' in fluorescence microscopy images yields quantitative information on the underlying dynamical processes. We have developed an approach for tracking multiple fluorescent particles based on probabilistic data association. The approach combines a localization scheme that uses a bottom-up strategy based on the spot-enhancing filter as well as a top-down strategy based on an ellipsoidal sampling scheme that uses the Gaussian probability distributions computed by a Kalman filter. The localization scheme yields multiple measurements that are incorporated into the Kalman filter via a combined innovation, where the association probabilities are interpreted as weights calculated using an image likelihood. To track objects in close proximity, we compute the support of each image position relative to the neighboring objects of a tracked object and use this support to recalculate the weights. To cope with multiple motion models, we integrated the interacting multiple model algorithm. The approach has been successfully applied to synthetic 2-D and 3-D images as well as to real 2-D and 3-D microscopy images, and the performance has been quantified. In addition, the approach was successfully applied to the 2-D and 3-D image data of the recent Particle Tracking Challenge at the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) 2012.

"We are part of the solution," according to Dr. Bruce Wheeler, professor and interim chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Florida, Gainesville. As the new president of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS), Wheeler maintains leadership priorities that touch every stage of a biomedical engineer?s career?from the undergraduate level through the many roles and types of careers a senior engineer can enjoy?and include every way EMBS can take on the challenge of improving health care in response to present and imminent demands. He offers biomedical engineers a large-scale vision, showing them they are in a prime position to answer the questions the world will face as its population soars and the demand for health care increases, even as current modes of delivery struggle to achieve systemic adaption. In addition, he hopes to provide practical steps EMBS and its members can take to achieve that vision.

The 50th anniversary of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) is an appropriate time to look back at the origins and growth of both the field of biomedical engineering and the EMBS. The present account gives most attention to the aspects of biomedical engineering to which IEEE members (and, earlier, American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) members and Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) members) contributed, which is to say that this account emphasizes the electrical, electronic, and computing aspects of biomedical engineering. Topics covered include: history of the technologies; the roots of biomedical engineering; prehistory and history of the profession; biomedical applications of the computer; health care; ultrasound technology; new means of medical imaging; endoscopy, lasers, and fear of electromagnetic fields; study of human metabolism; the Human Genome Project, robotics, and internationalization; and forecasting progress in biomedical engineering.

The 31st Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) was held 2-6 September 2009 at the Hilton Hotel in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota, the world capital of medical device industry. The meeting gathered more than 2,000 world experts in biomedical engineering, including academics, researchers, industrialists, clinicians, and trainees for five days of science, networking, and social events.

The five articles in this special section resulted from the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) Forum on Grand Challenges in Neuroengineering, held in May 2010 in Bethesda, MD.

During the last decade, the Human Genome Project [1], Human Proteome Project [2], Human Physiome Project [3], The International HapMap Project, Genome-Wide Associate Study (GWAS), The 1000 Genomes Project, The Human Microbiome Project, Epigenome, Metabolome, LIPID MAPS, and Next Generation Sequencing have generated large volumes of molecular data about human genes, proteins, physiology, SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphism), metabolites, and lipids etc. This has led to the fast growth of several research sub-areas: 1) high-volume molecular data mining and interpretation; 2) systems biology based on molecular features (i.e., biomarkers) extracted from high-throughput data. Examples include molecular interaction network reconstruction and pathway modeling; 3) synthetic biology, where researchers use engineering approach to make artificial cell and organism; and 4) translational bioinformatics that identifies genomic and proteomic biomarkers of disease to understand molecular mechanisms and guide clinical decision making. This field has grown so rapidly that there are a dozen bioinformatics conferences each year organized by researchers with different backgrounds such as biological or medical sciences, computing or computer science, and engineering. In 2004, the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) started the theme “Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Systems Biology, Modeling Methodologies.” It started with high throughput omic data analysis, structural bioinformatics, physiological modeling, then moved to systems biology, and recently included synthetic biology, with future movement towards translational bioinformatics in biomedical applications such as cancer prevention, therapeutics, clinical data mining and decision making. In this spotlight, we summarize key topics of importance for the EMBS community.

A new engineering in medicine and biology society (EMBS) book on applications of computers in medicine [lists table of contents

The 33rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) has come to a successful end in Boston, and I'd like to use this column to bring your attention to two upcoming, exciting conferences sponsored by the EMBS.

To Help You Stay Current with Technology for 1982 A New Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) Book on Applications of Computers in Medicine

I came across an e-newsletter from the British Museum last week advertising free delivery when you spend more than £100 on British Museum sculptures and replicas. Inasmuch as my small flat in London could use a bust replica of an Egyptian noble woman or a Rosetta Stone coffee mug, it was the ending of the newsletter that caught my eye in particular. To help others find this newsletter, the British Museum has conveniently provided links to ten networking Web sites (some of which I have never heard of): Digg It!, Del.ico.us, Newsvine, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Myspace, LinkedIn. The British Museum is e-savvy. I started to think about the IEEE and the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS), and I thought I would share some of our own proud e-achievements and current endeavors that we have come a long way over the past several years.

The year 2009 has been a productive year for the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS). We have accomplished a great deal in enhancing the quality of conferences and publications, owing to the tremendous efforts from our volunteers and staff. I take great pride in recognizing the achievements of our members. Across the globe, we are fortunate to have innumerable examples of significant progress. It is my pleasure to report to you the past year's highlights.

It will be March when you receive this issue of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (SPM), and it has been almost four years since the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS)'s Inside Signal Processing eNewsletter (eNews) was first launched in April 2007, as the latest addition to SPM. When spring begins, flowers blossom and a new start brings new hopes. As the old Chinese saying goes, “A year's plan starts with spring.” This is precisely what we are doing for the bimonthly SPM and the monthly eNews that complements the magazine.

Presents a list of articles published by the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) that ranked among the top 100 most downloaded IEEE Xplore articles.