The Art of MEDICAL Electronics

[reflowman]

Kernel hackers read K&R every day.
EE's read AoE every day.
Medical EE's read every day.

Please fill in for me.

Seriously, I can't find anything except some very poorly reviewed book on Amazon. Otherwise it's very specialised medical papers or DIY TENS stuff.
I'm an old, retired EE (with no medical experience) starting to research Parkinsons and I just want a practical primer on medical stimulation and measurement best practice.

[Andy Watson]

As you've probably realised, medical electronics gets specialised very fast - it's not usually a DIY subject. Aside from the electronics there's also the safety aspect to consider. The go-to book used to be:
Medical Instrumentation: Application and Design - John G Webster.
I don't know if it's still available. It covers the basics but was already dated the last time I saw a copy (10-15 years ago).  Another, similar book is:
Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering - B.H Brown, R.H Smallwood, D.C. Barber, P.V Lawford, D.R Hose

Most of the up-to-date reading material came from the jornals - like Medical Physics and Biological Engineering - but you'll need a university library (or very deep pockets) to access these.

[reflowman]

The go-to book used to be:
Medical Instrumentation: Application and Design - John G Webster.
I don't know if it's still available.

Great reply! Thank you very much Andy.
I've found that book s/hand for pennies on Amazon - it doesn't matter if it's out of date - at least I get to dip a toe in the water.
Your mention of university libraries reminded me that a mate is a surgeon at a teaching hospital nearby; I'm sure a pint will yield a reader's ticket!
I really appreciate you getting me started.
Bob

[dietert1]

Standards in that area are usually not in the open domain but secret. A real pain. I don't remember when that happened, maybe more than 30 years ago. Nowadays even legal standards are sometimes offered for money.
Medical electronics standards are often made such as to prevent smaller enterprises from entering the market or chasing them away. FDA is famous for being involved in that, big money involved. Certainly a standard for EEG devices has several hundred pages with rules to observe, and that is a simple case because it works non-intrusive.
Research on medical electronics is slow and expensive, since many different qualifications are involved. For example a device may fail approval because its case or parts of the case are not made from certified bio-compatible materials. An electronics engineer cannot get anywhere without some medical doctors around. Recently i showed somebody a doppler measurement of blood movement in arteria. Now - is high speed something good or does it mean those arteria are narrow?

Regards, Dieter

[thm_w]

Most of the up-to-date reading material came from the jornals - like Medical Physics and Biological Engineering - but you'll need a university library (or very deep pockets) to access these.

There are scientific hubs where you can find access to these things. Or maybe take a part time class at the local university if you wish.

[apis]

It's strange how we first pay for research with tax payer money, then the researchers pay the journals to get published, then the journals sell the articles back to the universities for more tax money.

[edy]

It's strange how we first pay for research with tax payer money, then the researchers pay the journals to get published, then the journals sell the articles back to the universities for more tax money.

You forgot one thing...   Hacker commits suicide after being sued by government for releasing journal articles for free access. See this article:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/walterpavlo/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-hacker-case-ends-with-suicide/#50b2d16757cd

And this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Let's never forget this case and his name.

Some interesting bits from the Wikipedia article in regards to allowing open access to academic research articles:

A long-time supporter of open access, Swartz wrote in his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto:[63]
The world's entire scientific ... heritage ... is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations....

The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it.

Supporters of Swartz responded to news of his death with an effort called #PDFTribute[165] to promote Open Access.[166][167] On January 12, Eva Vivalt, a development economist at the World Bank, began posting her academic articles online using the hashtag #pdftribute as a tribute to Swartz.[167][168][169] Scholars posted links to their works.[170]

The story of Aaron Swartz has exposed the topic of open access to scientific publications to wider audiences.[171][172]

In the wake of Aaron Swartz, many institutions and personalities have campaigned for open access to scientific knowledge.[173]

Swartz's death prompted calls for more open access to scholarly data (e.g., open science data).[174][175]

The Think Computer Foundation and the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University announced scholarships awarded in memory of Aaron Swartz.[176]

In 2013, Swartz was posthumously awarded the American Library Association's James Madison Award for being an "outspoken advocate for public participation in government and unrestricted access to peer-reviewed scholarly articles."[177][178]

In March, the editor and editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration resigned en masse, citing a dispute with the journal's publisher, Routledge.[179] One board member wrote of a "crisis of conscience about publishing in a journal that was not open access" after the death of Aaron Swartz.[180][181]

In 2002, Swartz had stated that when he died, he wanted all the contents of his hard drives made publicly available.[182][183]

The "cOAlition S", a consortium launched by the European Research Council continues the fight of Aaron Swartz with the will to make available to all by 2020 all the scientific publications financed by the member states of this coalition.[184]

I see what you did here:

There are scientific hubs where you can find access to these things. Or maybe take a part time class at the local university if you wish.

By the way, the Wikipedia article also mentions this:

Sci-Hub[edit]
Kazakh computer scientist and neuro-researcher Alexandra Elbakyan founded the website Sci-Hub.[249] Sci-Hub gives access to paywalled articles through its repository without paying, as of 2016 holding over 50 million articles.[249][250] Elbakyan has frequently been compared to Swartz in her solid criticism of paywalls and her dedication to Sci-Hub which she says will not be brought down regardless of lawsuits.[251]

[Technobabble_]

I've posted this in another thread, but I'll post it here again:

These are places I've collected over the years for accessing academic papers.

1. Sci Hub: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
2. Library Genesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis This is mostly for books, but papers and academic journals too
3. In the US, some libraries have free JSTOR access; simply connect to wifi
4. ArXiv: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv Only certain fields.
5. ResearchGate: must need .edu address. Sign up for a class at a local community college and get one.
6. NSF Public Access Repository: https://par.nsf.gov/
7. Academia: https://www.academia.edu/ Note: I have not used this service, so I do not know the quality.
8. DOAJ i.e. Directory of Open Access Journals: https://doaj.org/
9. Email the professor!
10. the Directory of Open Access Repositories: http://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/opendoar/
11. PLOS - the Public Library of Science https://www.plos.org/

[edy]

I think when it comes to paying for journal publications, the cost has to do with the peer review and critical analysis process. At least, that's a way to try to "justify" paying for publicly-funded papers. You cannot cite printing/mailing cost because then their online version should be free or very nominally priced (running the servers/storage should be fairly cheap these days).

So what I mean by peer review/critical analysis is that journals receive hundreds of potential articles every month, maybe thousands. They need a team of people there to critically analyze the papers on their merits and find methodological issues that could bias the results or lead to false conclusions. We would assume the authors and their respective institutions would have already done this, and we know of cases of academic fraud which have escaped detection for years, but you would expect the more you pay for an article (or the more "prestigious" the journal) the more time and effort they would have spent vetting it.

Now I have no idea if there is any correlation between the quality of articles, scientific importance or methodological rigor employed in them and the journal in which it appears (class "A", "B" or "C"-level, etc). All I know is some labs go absolutely crazy if they get published in Nature or British Medical Journal, but then there are other less prestigious journals that will publish them, and then bottom of the heap ones. Would they differ in the importance or significance of the article? Does it make a difference to the amount of research money the lab gets? Publish or Perish?

There is definitely a model there for reward and I think these journals fit in that, but I'm not entirely sure if the people employed by these various journals warrant being paid or are needed to sort and categorize and rate the articles that are being written, and if we are paying for that service in a way. Imagine a free-for-all science hub where anyone can publish... Usually scientists and researchers can determine themselves the quality of the article or lab because of previous publication history, number of other articles that reference it (sort of the "hyperlink" score), etc.

I'm not in a University setting anymore digging up journals and yes I did access articles from a few journals using my professor's account (he subscribed to the printed journal and gave out access to some of his students to access it online)... but these were like $250 a year subscriptions, were very specialized, and impossible for students to afford who were trying to write their own papers or look up basic information. And the teachers made photocopies of everything, I'm sure they didn't pay the publisher a cent and this was in an academic institution! But I can see why you may need to have a publisher, why they need to make money, and what possible service they may provide to the scientific community. If things go absolutely "free" online it may make it more difficult to filter through the crap and bias and insignificant stuff to find the golden quality gems, unless the online system is designed to allow feedback and ratings and peer review to be tagged along with each article (and trusted credentialing).

[coppercone2]

there are a few IEC standards you can look at (not only for EMI but also for shock safety etc).

[tooki]

I think when it comes to paying for journal publications, the cost has to do with the peer review and critical analysis process. At least, that's a way to try to "justify" paying for publicly-funded papers. You cannot cite printing/mailing cost because then their online version should be free or very nominally priced (running the servers/storage should be fairly cheap these days).

So what I mean by peer review/critical analysis is that journals receive hundreds of potential articles every month, maybe thousands. They need a team of people there to critically analyze the papers on their merits and find methodological issues that could bias the results or lead to false conclusions. We would assume the authors and their respective institutions would have already done this, and we know of cases of academic fraud which have escaped detection for years, but you would expect the more you pay for an article (or the more "prestigious" the journal) the more time and effort they would have spent vetting it.

Now I have no idea if there is any correlation between the quality of articles, scientific importance or methodological rigor employed in them and the journal in which it appears (class "A", "B" or "C"-level, etc). All I know is some labs go absolutely crazy if they get published in Nature or British Medical Journal, but then there are other less prestigious journals that will publish them, and then bottom of the heap ones. Would they differ in the importance or significance of the article? Does it make a difference to the amount of research money the lab gets? Publish or Perish?

There is definitely a model there for reward and I think these journals fit in that, but I'm not entirely sure if the people employed by these various journals warrant being paid or are needed to sort and categorize and rate the articles that are being written, and if we are paying for that service in a way. Imagine a free-for-all science hub where anyone can publish... Usually scientists and researchers can determine themselves the quality of the article or lab because of previous publication history, number of other articles that reference it (sort of the "hyperlink" score), etc.

I'm not in a University setting anymore digging up journals and yes I did access articles from a few journals using my professor's account (he subscribed to the printed journal and gave out access to some of his students to access it online)... but these were like $250 a year subscriptions, were very specialized, and impossible for students to afford who were trying to write their own papers or look up basic information. And the teachers made photocopies of everything, I'm sure they didn't pay the publisher a cent and this was in an academic institution! But I can see why you may need to have a publisher, why they need to make money, and what possible service they may provide to the scientific community. If things go absolutely "free" online it may make it more difficult to filter through the crap and bias and insignificant stuff to find the golden quality gems, unless the online system is designed to allow feedback and ratings and peer review to be tagged along with each article (and trusted credentialing).

The thing is, my understanding is that, to remain impartial, the scholars who perform the peer review aren’t paid, either!

I can sorta understand the publishers needing to charge money back when the journals had to be typeset in lead type, or even by imagesetter, and then printed and distributed. But in the era of desktop publishing, and even web? It’s become nothing more than a racket.

Years ago, I worked for a software company that makes reference management software. The primary competitor was EndNote, which at the time was owned by Thomson Reuters, a huge academic publisher. But our product also had integrated database searches, many of which are also from the academic publishers. And lemme tell you, THAT is a racket!!! Many charge exorbitant subscription fees, but a small handful retained their punchcard-era price policies, charging per search! 

[MatteoX]

Previously mentioned Webster is probably still the stanard textbook for this field.

You may also want to check Prutchi "Design and Development of Medical Electronic Instrumentation". This book is at the lower level than Webster but it has a lot of practical circuits.

[Dubbie]

I have the prutchi book. I found it slightly old fashioned.

[TimNJ]

IEC 60601 has lots of information. It's written in law-speak though. But, there are many "translations" and interpretations online that are useful in understanding not only the standard, but why the standard includes all of these requirements.

[harnon]

I think you can find quite a lot of biomedical engineering papers through open access these days, although I have access through a University library so I couldn't tell you the proprotion that are free. You can try on pubmed if you want to read papers, there are tonnes on deep brain stimulation for Parkinsons but I suppose they mostly focus on the stimulation not the stimulator.

IEEE publish a lot of articles about neural stimulation electronics, especially looking at portable / low power ASICs, and often in conference proceedings which might be open access. As an aside there is a pretty interesting group that's developing portable neural stimulation backpacks for dragon flies.

At least in the reading I do there haven't been all that many advances recently in the electronics themselves. It has more been about different stimulation modes (using multiple electrodes to steer current, high frequency non-invasive stimulation, optical stimulation, etc) as opposed to the electronics themselves. I could be biased in what I read though as my "day job" involves one of these alternative modes

Medical device compliance (especially neural stimulators) is for obvious reasons a Really Big Deal. I remember going to a talk from Saluda medical who are developing a spinal cord stimulator and they showed their compliance paperwork pile that they had to submit to the TGA or FDA for clinical trials (I think). It was literally 2m tall, and then they had to do a follow up submission 1m tall. Commercially available stimulators like this take decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, so I don't think the electronics themselves move particularly fast.

[MatteoX]

I have the prutchi book. I found it slightly old fashioned.

Yes, it is 15 years old. It uses old construction techniques, through hole components... The level, as I mentioned previously, is much lower than Webster's. book. The reason I suggested this book is that OP mentioned AoE. Prutchi is the only medical electronics book I know that includes practical construction circuits. It can be viewed as a lab course in medical electronics with tons of circuit to experiment with.

I wouldn't spend $200 Amazon is asking but the used one can be bought for $20 - $30.

[Dubbie]

Right. The reason I bought it was because I enjoyed his other book “exploring quantum physics through hands on experiments” I learned a huge amount from it. I have an interest in medical devices so thought his other might be similarly as good.

[harnon]

I've seen the Webster book on Abe for $10 delivered (3rd edition). I think I'll pick it up if the eevblog effect doesn't suddenly raise prices by 10000000%

[jeremy]

This is how academic publishing generally works in Australia (in my experience).

1. To get promoted, you need to bring in more grant money, or you need to publish in “high impact” journals. Impact has a specific definition in different contexts, but it’s basically the average number of citations per article published.
2. University library pays many millions of dollars to publishers to have articles available inside the institution
3. Academics get grant money, do research, cite those paper from the librarys and send it to the most impactful journal they think they can get away with. These academics are not paid by the publisher, in fact the academic needs to pay the publisher to accept the paper in a lot of cases using the grant money.
4. Publisher sends the paper to be reviewed by academics at other institutions. Those academics are not paid by the publisher.
5. Journal editor accepts or rejects article based on peer review. Unless it’s a big journal, the editor is not paid by the publisher. Journal editor is generally a senior academic at a different university.

As you can see, the process involves giving lots of money to publishers for them to basically send emails between academics and run some web services. Academics have no choice but to play the game because they want to be promoted, but to be promoted you need to give money to the publishers to get access to articles, etc. Hence why some academics have animosity to publishers (in my opinion, rightly so)

Some attempts have been made to change this at the grant level by forcing grant recipients to publish in open access journals (journals which are free to access). But this is really just shifting where the money comes from; instead of the publisher getting money from the library, they charge the academics a few thousand dollars to have their article published. It’s probably still taxpayer money either way.

[harnon]

Yep exactly, but its even worse in some cases given the high proportion of academics these days that are permanently on short terms contracts. If they don't publish then they don't get grants then in short order they don't have a job.

[jeremy]

Yep exactly, but its even worse in some cases given the high proportion of academics these days that are permanently on short terms contracts. If they don't publish then they don't get grants then in short order they don't have a job.

Yes, I have personal experience with that