MEDSIP Technical Scope The conference is organised primarily around five special themes as follows: * Electrophysiology (electrocardiology and electroencephalography/electromyography) * Critical/intensive care * Medical imaging and image processing * Non-linear signal processing * Emerging technologies The organising committee invites contributions in any of the proposed topic areas below: 1 Electrophysiology • Electrocardiography: electrocardiogram (ECG) beat detection;arrhythmia analysis; ST segment analysis; ECG compression; ambulatory and exercise ECG analysis; automatic defibrillation; pacemakers; ECG modeling; advanced systems; clinical applications. • Electroencephalography and Electromyography: electroencephalogram (EEG) and evoked potential (EP) analysis; applications of the EEG and EP in sleep-disorder studies; assessment of brain diseases including epilepsy and dementia; depth of anaesthesia monitoring; electromyogram (EMG) analysis and applications; nerve stimulation; functional electrical stimulation ( FES ); advanced neurophysiological systems. 2 Acute Medical Specialities for Critical/Intensive Care (IC) • Anaesthesia and IC: depth of anaesthesia monitoring; EEG and EP bispectral analysis; closed loop anaesthesia systems; heart rate analysis; pulse oximetry; gas analysers; cardiovascular systems; cardiac output measurements; respiratory system measurements. • Obstetrics: fetal ECG analysis; CTG analysis;umbilical cord blood gas analysis; neonatal medicine; neonatal (EP) analysis; advanced monitoring systems. 3 Medical Imaging and Image Processing • Imaging Modalities: x-ray techniques; computed tomography (CT); magnetic resonance imaging (MRI); Doppler and ultrasound; infrared; digital radiography. • Image and Video Analysis: enhancement and restoration; reconstruction; segmentation; interpretation and understanding; compression and transmission for telemedicine. • Application Areas: cardiac imaging; cardiovascular and cardiorespiratory systems; fetal imaging; functional MRI; digital mammographic image analysis; EEG/EP mapping; 2D/3D image display and visualization; bone densitometry; breast, chest and skin image analysis; histo-cytological applications. 4 Non-linear Techniques • Enabling Techniques: time-frequency and wavelet analysis; denoising methods; fractals and chaos; artificial neural networks (ANNs); time-varying filtering; non-linear dynamics; hidden-markov models (HMMs); higher-order statistics (HOS); blind deconvolution; principal components analysis (PCA); independent components analysis (ICA). • Application Areas: ECGs, EEGs, heart rate variability, mammograms, x-rays, MRI, CT, ultrasound; non-linear dynamics in cardiovascular and cardiorespiratory systems; non-linear/chaotic analysis of ECGs and EEGs; fractal analysis of cardiac dysfunction; fractal and bispectrum analysis of EEGs and EPs; non-linear image processing; ANN-based non-linear filtering and event detection. 5 Emerging Technologies • Enabling Techniques: medical data mining, machine learning and knowledge discovery; pattern analysis; artificial intelligence (AI) data processing; medical knowledge modeling; ANNs; expert systems; fuzzy logic; fuzzy-neural; multimedia signal processing. • Application Areas: electrophysiology; critical care; diabetes therapy; management of labour; screening; primary care; rehabilitation; medical data processing (e.g. hospital/patient information systems); telemedicine; visualization; signal & information processing technologies for on-line health care, medical systems modeling; neural prosthetic interfaces. Top of Page SUBMISSION OF PAPERS Authors are requested to submit full papers of 4 pages in length by Friday 3rd February, 2006. These should clearly identify the medical or healthcare context of the work, the methodology used, the advances made and the significance of the results. The papers should only concern significant work already completed and work on currently unfinished or future work should not be submitted. The material submitted must be original, and must neither have been published nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere. Papers will be accepted as either oral papers or as poster papers. Authors will be notified of acceptance by Friday 7 th April 2006. Final contributions will be published as part of The Institution of Engineering and Technology Conference Proceedings (on CD-ROM) and will be available to all conference delegates. A number of selected papers will also be invited to submit an extended paper for the Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing Journal. Completed papers should be submitted using the online submission page and at least the presenting author must register for the conference. Each presenting author is only allowed to submit two papers. All Authors must use the MEDSIP paper template. (Download template) Visit the Author Guidelines page for more details on submitting your paper. Top of Page IMPORTANT DEADLINES Full paper submission date: Friday, 3rd February 2006 Notification of acceptance: Friday, 7th April 2006 Receipt of camera ready copy: Friday, 28th April 2006 Conference start date: Monday, 17th July 2006 REGISTRATION Please note that a least one presenting author must register for the conference. WORKING LANGUAGE The Working language of the Conference is English, which will be used for all printed material, presentations and discussion