Abstract
Bioelectromagnetics is a branch of science that examines how living organisms interact with electromagnetic fields. In a broader sense, it is a discipline that spans the fields of signal processing, electromagnetics, medical imaging, physiology, medical physics, anatomy, occupational and environmental health, behavioral, and computer sciences. Due to its provision of interactive and flexible programming environment, this chapter describes a LabVIEW based data visualization system that has been implemented and used in bioelectromagnetics simulations. The graphical nature of the LabVIEW programming environment makes it very easy to create a sophisticated application in a minimum amount of time, especially when compared to designing graphical user interfaces in a low-level programming language.
TopBackground
Bioelectromagnetics
Bioelectromagnetics is the field that depicts the interaction of electromagnetic (EMW) waves with biological systems (Furse et al., 2009). The Common core area of study in bioelectromagnetics includes the study of the interactions between electromagnetic waves and human tissue. Recent advances in computational techniques have made it easier to assess the EMW behavior within the exposed biological tissue model numerically.
Computational techniques are extremely powerful for solving bioelectromagnetic problems and have been successfully employed in the modelling of microwave applicators used in hyperthermia (Polk & Postow, 1995; Maruyama et al., 2006), calculating electromagnetic signal absorption in human body models (Reyhani & Ludwig, 2006), and for dosimetry of mobile handhelds (Lin, 2006).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Multilayered Method: A technique used in electromagnetic analysis to determine the absorbed power in a one-dimensional biological model which has been arranged into several distinct tissues layers with different intrinsic properties using transmission line analogy.
Outer Radiation Boundary Condition (ORBC): A condition that is needed to be satisfied at all the outside edges or surface of the computational space domain in which a set of differential equations is to be solved.
Dosimetry: The measurement and assessment of the absorbed electromagnetic radiation in biological tissue.
LabVIEW: An acronym for “Laboratory Virtual In strument Engineering Workbench” and is a development environment for a visual programming language from National Instruments (NIs) designed for every engineer and scientist to solve real world problems compared to text-based programming (e.g. Matlab, C).
Computational Techniques: The techniques that use computers to analyze and solve scientific and engineering problems.
Bioelectromagnetics: A branch of science that describes the interaction of electromagnetic (EMW) waves with living organisms.
Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD): A mathematical technique used for finding an approximate solution to differential equations used in various areas of applied sciences.