This volume presents the proceedings of the 7th Asian-Pacific Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering (APCMBE 2008). Themed "Biomedical Engineering – Promoting Sustainable Development of Modern Medicine" the proceedings address a broad spectrum of topics from Bioengineering and Biomedicine, like Biomaterials, Artificial Organs, Tissue Engineering, Nanobiotechnology and Nanomedicine, Biomedical Imaging, Bio MEMS, Biosignal Processing, Digital Medicine, BME Education. It helps medical and biological engineering professionals to interact and exchange their ideas and experiences.

th On behalf of the organizing committee of the 13 International Conference on Biomedical Engineering, I extend our w- mest welcome to you. This series of conference began in 1983 and is jointly organized by the YLL School of Medicine and Faculty of Engineering of the National University of Singapore and the Biomedical Engineering Society (Singapore). First of all, I want to thank Mr Lim Chuan Poh, Chairman A*STAR who kindly agreed to be our Guest of Honour to give th the Opening Address amidst his busy schedule. I am delighted to report that the 13 ICBME has more than 600 participants from 40 countries. We have received very high quality papers and inevitably we had to turndown some papers. We have invited very prominent speakers and each one is an authority in their field of expertise. I am grateful to each one of them for setting aside their valuable time to participate in this conference. For the first time, the Biomedical Engineering Society (USA) will be sponsoring two symposia, ie “Drug Delivery S- tems” and “Systems Biology and Computational Bioengineering”. I am thankful to Prof Tom Skalak for his leadership in this initiative. I would also like to acknowledge the contribution of Prof Takami Yamaguchi for organizing the NUS-Tohoku’s Global COE workshop within this conference. Thanks also to Prof Fritz Bodem for organizing the symposium, “Space Flight Bioengineering”. This year’s conference proceedings will be published by Springer as an IFMBE Proceedings Series.

Present Your Research to the World! The World Congress 2009 on Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering – the triennial scientific meeting of the IUPESM - is the world’s leading forum for presenting the results of current scientific work in health-related physics and technologies to an international audience. With more than 2,800 presentations it will be the biggest conference in the fields of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering in 2009! Medical physics, biomedical engineering and bioengineering have been driving forces of innovation and progress in medicine and healthcare over the past two decades. As new key technologies arise with significant potential to open new options in diagnostics and therapeutics, it is a multidisciplinary task to evaluate their benefit for medicine and healthcare with respect to the quality of performance and therapeutic output. Covering key aspects such as information and communication technologies, micro- and nanosystems, optics and biotechnology, the congress will serve as an inter- and multidisciplinary platform that brings together people from basic research, R&D, industry and medical application to discuss these issues. As a major event for science, medicine and technology the congress provides a comprehensive overview and in–depth, first-hand information on new developments, advanced technologies and current and future applications. With this Final Program we would like to give you an overview of the dimension of the congress and invite you to join us in Munich! Olaf Dössel Congress President Wolfgang C.

14th Nordic – Baltic Conference on Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics – NBC-2008 – brought together scientists not only from the Nordic – Baltic region, but from the entire world. This volume presents the Proceedings of this international conference, jointly organized by the Latvian Medical Engineering and Physics Society, Riga Technical University and University of Latvia in close cooperation with International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE) The topics covered by the Conference Proceedings include: Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering; Biomechanics, Artificial Organs, Implants and Rehabilitation; Biomedical Instrumentation and Measurements, Biosensors and Transducers; Biomedical Optics and Lasers; Healthcare Management, Education and Training; Information Technology to Health; Medical Imaging, Telemedicine and E-Health; Medical Physics; Micro- and Nanoobjects, Nanostructured Systems, Biophysics

The 4th European Congress of the International Federation for Medical and Biological Federation was held in Antwerp, November 2008. The scientific discussion on the conference and in this conference proceedings include the following issues: Signal & Image Processing ICT Clinical Engineering and Applications Biomechanics and Fluid Biomechanics Biomaterials and Tissue Repair Innovations and Nanotechnology Modeling and Simulation Education and Professional

It is with great pleasure that we present to you a collection of over 200 high quality technical papers from more than 10 countries that were presented at the Biomed 2008. The papers cover almost every aspect of Biomedical Engineering, from artificial intelligence to biomechanics, from medical informatics to tissue engineering. They also come from almost all parts of the globe, from America to Europe, from the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific. This set of papers presents to you the current research work being carried out in various disciplines of Biomedical En- neering, including new and innovative researches in emerging areas. As the organizers of Biomed 2008, we are very proud to be able to come-up with this publication. We owe the success to many individuals who worked very hard to achieve this: members of the Technical Committee, the Editors, and the Inter- tional Advisory Committee. We would like to take this opportunity to record our thanks and appreciation to each and every one of them. We are pretty sure that you will find many of the papers illuminating and useful for your own research and study. We hope that you will enjoy yourselves going through them as much as we had enjoyed compiling them into the proceedings. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Noor Azuan Abu Osman Chairperson, Organising Committee, Biomed 2008

th On behalf of the steering and organizing committees I would like to welcome you to sunny Miami Florida for the 25 Sou- ern Biomedical Engineering Conference. This year we are excited to have visitors from all over North America, South American, Europe and Asia to share exciting developments in all areas of Biomedical Engineering. The main objective of this conference is to bring together students, researchers and clinicians in Biomedical Engineering to disseminate technical information in this rapidly growing field, and provide a forum consisting of established as well as new and future researchers in this exciting engineering field. This year’s meeting features more than 140 high quality papers, many by students, for oral presentations and publication in the conference proceedings. The conference owes its success to the dedicated work of the keynote speakers, conference chairs, authors, participants, students, organizers, and the College of Engineering and Computing webmaster. We wish to especially acknowledge the work of the peer reviewers, program committee, staff of the BME Department, and the student organizing committee. We also wish to acknowledge the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation and the International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering, and Simpleware, Ltd. We hope that you enjoy your experience, make new collaborations and lasting friendships.