On September 1st 2023 at 14.00, Geletaw Sahle will defend his PhD entitled “DEVELOPING CLINICAL DECISION SUPPORT INSTRUMENTS FOR THE POINT-OF-CARE IN LOW RESOURCE SETTINGS”.

Everybody is invited to attend the presentation at the Room E.0.05.

Clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) have been shown to assist clinical decision making in healthcare while also enabling timely and appropriate integrated care services. The clinical pathway (CP), in particular, delivers and outlines an optimal logical path and plan of care from assessment to treatment at the primary and secondary health care level. Clinical pathways are increasingly used in routine patient care to maintain care process standardization, improve patient outcomes, reduce costs, and empower local healthcare practitioners. However, these clinical decision support and/or clinical pathway systems have remained out of reach for low-resource settings (LRSs). In LRSs, following the paper-based clinical guideline is a traditional practice and the only choice utmost. The service is suboptimal and challenged to deliver accurate and adequate evidence for decision making. Furthermore, low clinical competence, limited diagnostic capabilities, high turnover and low motivation are some of the challenges that most public health facilities in developing countries are facing on a day-to-day basis.

This dissertation demonstrates and develops computer-aided point-of-care decision support instruments for identifying referral and locally treatable cases. To develop CDSSs for LRSs, the overall need for the development of clinical decision support systems was initially assessed. Then, a state-of-the-art review was conducted to investigate design approaches for executable CPs at the point-of-care, and the results show that exploring a trade-off mechanism between knowledge-based and data-driven techniques is critical for promoting data-driven decision-making approaches. Next, an algorithm for the automated and dynamic generation of CPs was developed. The key principle of our proposed algorithm is that it operates with minimal clinical input and may be updated as new information becomes available, and it dynamically maps and validates the initial knowledge-based CP based on the local context and historical evidence in order to provide a multi-criteria decision analysis. The proposed solution was then deployed on an edge device, the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, to provide a point-of-care clinical reference, data processing, and workflow generator, as well as an interactive data visualization and clinical guidance wizard for LRS. Finally, user acceptance of the CDSS at the point-of-care in LRSs was evaluated using 22 parameters organized into six major categories, namely ease of use, system quality, information quality, decision changes, process changes, and user acceptance. A follow-up interview, on the other hand, indicated a variety of reasons for disagreement based on the neutral, disagree, and strongly disagree responses. Furthermore, the overall acceptability was simulated using partial least squares structural equation modeling, and a variety of factors impacting the acceptance of the CDSS in LRSs were examined. In all, the key features of the CDSSs are able to provide low-cost, automated, adaptable, interactive, and applicable CPs for LRSs. A wider scale evaluation and longitudinal measurements, including CDSS usage frequency, speed of operation and impact on intervention time have not been included in the thesis work, because they require a larger deployment in daily practice.

Creation of research groups LAMI (Micro-and Photon-Electronics)and IRIS (Image and video processing).

Pratap Renukaswamy presented a live demo of his FMCW radar at ISSCC 2023

The Master in Applied Computer Science at VUB accepts students with a bachelor or Master in Engineering or Exact Sciences

On May 9 2022 at 14.00 Zhiwei Zong will defend his PhD entitled “DESIGN OF VCOs AND PAs IN 22 NM FD-SOI FOR 5G MM-WAVE COMMUNICATIONS”.

Everybody is invited to attend the presentation online via this TEAMS link.

The use of spectrum in the millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) frequency range is considered as a key enabler to continue the insatiable demand for increased wireless data capacity. This spectrum will be adopted in the 5G wireless communication standard. To obtain a high integration degree for the implementation of 5G mm-Wave transceivers, advanced CMOS is the preferred technology. The higher operating frequency, compared to 4G, poses more design challenges on the key building blocks of a transceiver. This PhD thesis focuses on the design of the two key building blocks in a 5G mm-Wave transceiver, namely a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) and a power amplifier (PA). All building blocks designed in this PhD work are operating in the 20-30 GHz frequency region. All building blocks have been designed in a 22nm fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) CMOS technology.

First, a modified transformer-feedback VCO (TF-VCO) with a sourcebridging capacitor (Cs) is introduced. Thanks to the use of Cs, the phase noise (PN) in the 1/f2 and 1/f3 regions are both improved compared to earlier published TF-VCOs. The origin of the PN improvement by the use Cs is explained in this thesis. It is seen that with Cs we can improve the symmetry of the waveform of the voltage over the tank of the VCO. Also, with Cs the effective quality factor of the transformer can be increased, which also reduces phase noise. These theoretical investigations are proven with measurement results. With a second design, an LC-VCO design, another key design challenge is tackled, namely the suppression of flicker noise upconversion. A 22-29GHz voltage-biased LC-VCO is designed and implemented to suppress this flicker noise upconversion by using a flicker noise filtering technique. A self-coupled inductor and a common-centroid capacitor bank layout are proposed in this design to guarantee a good flicker noise suppression over the frequency tuning range.

Next, two 28GHz PAs are designed and implemented for 5G mm-Wave communications. The first PA focuses on generation of a high output power (Pout) with a high linearity. This is achieved in a first design that uses a two-way current combiner and an output stage that uses stacking of transistors. The stack of three transistors used in this design enables the generation of a high output power without overstressing the core devices. The second PA focuses on the power back-off (PBO) efficiency enhancement. This is important for communication with a high spectral efficiency: high-order modulation requires to operate at a relatively large back-off from the saturation level. The design is based on the Doherty architecture. By merging lumped passive components into a transformer, a transformer-based Doherty PA with a compact power combiner is obtained, achieving Doherty load modulation with a compact footprint. This design has the highest power density and ITRS PA figure-of-merit (FOM) among the published mm-wave Doherty PAs.

• First PhD thesis in the field of biomedical engineering (equipment and physical modelling).
• First home made thin film active electrode for electrocardiology.
• Semiconductor technology team counts 3 members.