Two Anniversaries of the Estonian Biomedical Engineering Community in 2004Exactly 10 years have passed since the Estonian Society for Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics together with the Biomedical Engineering Centre (BEC) at Tallinn University of Technology was established. The scientific conference dedicated to this double ten year anniversary was held on 14 October 2004. The scientific conference was opened by Prof. Kalju Meigas. He welcomed all participants and gave a short overview about the present status of the BEC. The President of the Estonian Society, Jaanus Lass, described the situation related to professional engineering accreditation and chartered engineering status in Estonia. The importance of this topic was stressed by an example according to which more danger to society could arise from unskillful politicians than from an engineer with low qualifications. A special issue of the Proceedings of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, Engineering, dedicated to Biomedical Engineering was presented by Prof. Emeritus Hiie Hinrikus, who was also the guest editor of this publication. The special issue consists of several papers from the field of Biomedical Engineering written by authors from different European countries. Many greetings and congratulations were delivered to the Estonian Society and BEC by the collaborative institutions from several parts of Europe to mark the festiveness of the event. After a short coffee break it was time to enjoy the invited speakers: Prof. Helmut Hutten from Austria, Prof. Jos Spaan from The Netherlands, Prof. Jaakko Malmivuo from Finland and Dr. Milan Tysler from Slovakia. The presentation "Model-based Interpretation of Intramyocardial Electrograms for Cardiac Risk Assessment and Surveillance" given by Prof. Hutten dealt with the monitoring of patients with cardiac diseases. The latest research in the field of intramyocardial electrograms seems to offer interesting possibilities to improve this kind of monitoring. Prof. Spaan demonstrated a model of coronary structure obtained by reconstructing information from 40 micrometer cut slices of the real heart. More profound investigation of the capillaries led to the discovery of the tiny villi inside the capillary wall, called glycocalyx. As believed, the villi are directly related to the health of the coronary vessels. A captivating historical review about the formation and origin of the theoretical understanding and technical principles of the EEG and MEG signal measurements was given by Prof. Malmivuo. As a conclusion a very democratic suggestion was made that the best results can be revealed in the combination of both methods. Finally Dr. Tysler talked about several interesting results obtained by modeling of the cardiac electric field in order to detect abnormalities in the myocardium e.g. local arrythmic sources. The conference continued with presentations from Estonian post graduate students. New perspectives in differential servo-oscillometry were described by Jaan Talts from the University of Tartu (UT), and the presentation about the pulse wave transit time in patients with hyperlipidaemia and hypertension was given by Irina Hlimonenko from Tallinn University of Technology (TUT). The studies in Focault cardiography were described by Sergei Malchenko (UT), Maie Bachmann from TUT presented research within the topic "Power Spectrum Distinguishes the Effect of Microwave Stimulation on Human EEG at Rest", and Andres Anier (TUT) told how the Higuchi fractal dimension and spectral entropy as a measure of sedation depth may be used for monitoring patients in the intensive care unit. The final presentation in the conference dealing with the study of effects of low-level microwave field by the "face masking" method was given by Anastassia Rodina (TUT). The scientific conference marked an important milestone for the Estonian Biomedical Engineering community and gave hope to continue towards new challenges.
Ivo Fridolin, Ph.D.
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