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This Special Issue is assembled from a selection of highly-rated technical papers presented at the 2020 IEEE Electron Devices Technology and Manufacturing Conference that took place April 6-21, 2020.

Therapeutic proteins are recombinant proteins generated through recombinant DNA technology and have attracted a great deal of interest in numerous applications, including pharmaceutical, cosmetic, human and animal health, agriculture, food, and bioremediation. Producing therapeutic proteins on a large scale, mainly in the pharmaceutical industry, necessitates a cost-effective, straightforward, and adequate manufacturing process. In industry, a protein separation technique based mainly on protein characteristics and modes of chromatography will be applied to optimize the purification process. Typically, the downstream process of biopharmaceutical operations may involve multiple chromatography phases that require the use of large columns pre-packed with resins that must be inspected before use. Approximately 20% of the proteins are assumed to be lost at each purification stage during the production of biotherapeutic products. Hence, to produce a high quality product, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, the correct approach and understanding of the factors influencing purity and yield during purification are necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bones act as a mineral storage reservoir for calcium and phosphorus. Proper well grown bones give a perfect posture to the human body. In other case, if the bone has an improper growth, it might lead to an abnormal posture or an awkward posture. Scoliosis is a condition where the scoliotic vertebrae are wedge shaped and differ with the shape of normal vertebrae. Treatment for scoliosis depends on Cobb angle which can be measured using spine X-rays. Recent development in the medical imaging techniques brought us to a new research area in image processing which includes medical image enhancement, detailed visualization of internal organs & tissues and edge detection. Bone edges are important feature in an X-ray image. The purpose of application of segmentation in medical imaging is to develop a detailed framework on human anatomy, whose primary objective is to outline the anatomical structures. Whereas edge detection is a technique which extracts vital features like corners, lines, angles and curves from an image. In this study, we are going to deal with the edge detection technique on scoliotic vertebrae. The objective of this paper is to compare the performance of edge detectors using filters and operators.

Scoliosis is a lateral or sideways deviation of the spine or vertebral column. Scoliosis can be treated by postural correction, providing braces or by surgery. Even after treating scoliosis with the help of brace or surgery, the normal spine range of motion is not achieved in most cases. After treating scoliosis either by brace or surgery, the normal posture might be achieved. But, it is important to know whether the patient is able regain his/her functionality. The mechanical properties of the vertebrae and intervertebral disc pressure after the application of brace and surgery are unknown and yet to be explored. In order to explore it, we come up with the thought of creating a 3D model of vertebrae. Because scientists and researchers depend upon cadaver specimens to try new fixations where the number of people willing to donate their body for research purpose is very low or nil in most of the countries. Without a sufficient number of cadaver specimens, the research progress remains still or very slow. Thus, creating a 3D model of vertebrae could yield more importance and convenience to do spine research. A 3D model of human spine can help in 3D printing too. In this study, we propose a simple method where the 3D model of scoliotic vertebrae can be created with the help of DICOM files.

An extension of blind source extraction (BSE) of one or a group of sources to the case of ill--conditioned and post-nonlinear (PNL) mixing is introduced. This is achieved by a 'mixed objective' type of cost function which jointly maximizes the kurtosis of a recovered source and estimates a measure of nonlinearity within the mixing system. This helps to circumvent problems with existing BSE methods, which are limited to noiseless and linear mixing models. Simulations illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithm and its usefulness, especially in the presence of very ill-conditioned mixing systems. Index Terms--Blind source extraction, blind source separation, deflation, ill-conditioned matrix, post-nonlinear (PNL) model.

Sleep apnea is a growing sleep disorder issue and estimate to affect 7% of the adult population in Malaysia. In this study, the electrical activity of the brain is studied using Electroencephalogram (EEG). The data obtained was then decomposed using three methods; Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD), Bivariate EMD and finally Ensemble EMD. The Index of Orthogonatility (IO) was obtained which shows EMD performed the most poorly, EEMD the best and Bivariate in between. The performance of EMD greatly improves when the number of samples was greatly decreased and very high peaks and more complex parts of the signal were excluded in the analysis. Segmentation was also conducted and the segmentation error revealed when an Event Related Potential (ERP) has happened which is when apnea occurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]