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Complex pathological brain patterns generally are found in neurodegenerative diseases which can be correlated with different clinical onsets of a particular pathology. Currently, an objective method that aids to determine such signs, in terms of global and local changes, is not available in clinical practice and the whole interpretation is dependent on the radiologist's skills. In this paper, we propose a fully automatic method that analyzes the brain structure under a multidimensional frame and highlights relevant brain patterns. An association of such patterns with the disease is herein evaluated in three classification tasks, involving probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) patients and normal subjects (NC). A set of 75 brain MR images from NC subjects (25), MCI (25) and probable AD (25) patients, split into training (15 subjects) and testing (60 subjects) sets, was used to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. Preliminary results show that the proposed method reaches a maximum classification accuracy of 80% when discriminating AD patients from NC, of 75% for classification of MCI patients from NC.

Article of the IEEE Education Engineering Conference (EDUCON). Keywords: educational courses, electronic engineering education, telecommunication engineering education, electronics curriculum, project based learning activities, project-oriented integral curriculum, telecommunication engineer degree, university degree structure, Bologna process This paper describes the Electronics curriculum in the Telecommunication Engineer degree at Rey Juan Carlos University (URJC) in Spain. Telecommunication Engineering started in the 2003-2004 academic year. In these years, all the electronic courses have been set up with a main practical orientation and with Project Based Learning (PBL) activities, both compulsory and voluntary. Once these courses have been successfully implemented we have reoriented some of the practical activities to be more interlaced. In this sense, projects involving students of different courses have been developed, as well as projects involving students from different years. All these activities fit in the principles promulgated by the Declaration of Bologna, which results in the actual updating of the university degree structure in Spain. Tecnología Electrónica

In this work, a device for generating automated olfactory stimuli in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies is described. The novel issues of our design are: synchronization between the acquisition and the olfactory task, automated control of experimental parameters (odorants sequences, frequency, time and concentration of stimuli). Finally, we present the preliminary results obtained on a General Electric 3 Tesla MRI scanner belong to The Alzheimer Project of the Fundacion Reina Sofia.

Article of the IEEE International Conference on Microelectronic Systems Education, 2009. MSE '09. Keywords: FPGAs, VHDL digital electronic circuit design, electronic teaching ,project-based learning methodology In this paper we present our experience in teaching digital electronic circuit and system design with FPGAs using VHDL. The course follows a project based learning methodology, in which the students learn how to design digital circuits and systems in a practical way. During the course, students design electronic circuits of incremental complexity. At the end of the course they are capable of implementing relatively complex projects, such as image processing systems and videogames. Tecnología Electrónica

The use of tissue Doppler imaging (TDI) has allowed to obtain velocity, strain and strain rate parameters in real time and is currently used routinely in the echocardiography lab. For analysis 2D image sequences, profiles are marked on the image, and quantitative time profiles are obtained from them, a procedure known as anatomic M-mode. For correct quantification, the position of the region of interest must be tracked along the sequence. We propose a model for tracking profiles using a dual grey level/TDI acquisition. Curves are tracked on the grey level sequence using an optical flow-based snake model and accurate TDI values are obtained from the tracked curve.

Cluster division is a crucial problem in analytical image based cytology. Existing algorithms often make use either of the image content or its geometric characterization. Both sources of information are needed for a correct segmentation of difficult clusters. Morphological algorithms naturally deal with the object oriented criteria such as shape, size, contrast, connectivity, etc. In this paper, we present and evaluate a morphological watershed based algorithm applied to fluorescence stained clustered nuclei division. Results are shown for two different types of samples namely bone marrow and peripheral blood specimens. These results are better than those obtained for other published algorithms. This algorithm can also be easily adapted to different types of specimens.