Bioengineering Laboratory

Description

The Bioengineering Laboratory encompasses skills from a wide range of engineering fields, and is aimed to the development, adaptation and application of the latest technological developments to medicine. IRCCS E. Medea has always been cutting the edge of treatment and rehabilitation of pediatric patients. The group further corroborates the vocation of the institute, developing new ad-hoc designed medical equipment (hardware and software) for diagnosis, rehabilitation, and daily assistance. Furthermore, the Lab has robots and a fully immersive virtual reality system available for treatment and recovery of motor and cognitive functions.

Additional areas of interest of the group are Signal Processing, including  research and development of methodologies for the analysis of bioelectrical signals, as well as Medical Informatics, developing informatics systems for the hospital and specific software required from other research areas of the center.

The main research topics / working areas of this group are:

• Prototyping devices and software dedicated to improving quality of life of patients and to rehabilitating pediatric patients, with focus on infants and children;
• Development and definition of rehabilitation protocols based on mechatronic robots and virtual reality;
• Identification of biomarkers for the screening of children with CNS disorders;
• Clinical experimentation of non-conforming medical devices (e.g. exoskeletons or wearable objects for the domiciliary treatment and monitoring)
• Technology transfer
• Creation of databases for the long term storage of data collected from healthy controls and pediatric patients, including clinical and genetics data and images.

Selected publications

• Beretta E, Cesareo A, Biffi E, Schafer C, Galbiati S, Strazzer S. Rehabilitation of upper limb in children with acquired brain injury: a preliminary comparative study. Journal of Healthcare Engineering [in press]
• Cesareo A, Lo Mauro A, Santi M, Biffi E, D’Angelo MG, Aliverti A. Acute Effects of Mechanical Insufflation-exsufflation on the breathing pattern in stable patients with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. Respiratory Care [in press]
• Biffi E, Beretta E, Cesareo A, Maghini C, Turconi AC, Reni G, et al. An Immersive Virtual Reality Platform to Enhance Walking Ability of Children with Acquired Brain Injuries. Methods Inf Med 2017 Jan 24.
• Peri E, Turconi AC, Biffi E, Maghini C, Panzeri D, Morganti R, et al. Effects of dose and duration of robot-assisted gait training on walking ability of children affected by cerebral palsy. Technol Health Care 2017 Apr 7.
• Lorusso ML, Biffi E, Molteni M, Reni G. Exploring the learnability and usability of a near field communication-based application for semantic enrichment in children with language disorders. Assist Technol 2017 Feb 13:1-12.
• Lunardini F, Cesareo A, Biffi E, Casellato C, Sanger TD. EMG-based vibro-tactile biofeedback improves motor control in children with secondary dystonia: two case reports. Neuropsychiatry 2016;6(6).
• Piazza C., Cantiani C., Akalin-Acar Z., Miyakoshi M., Benasich A. A., Reni G., et al. ICA-derived cortical responses indexing rapid multi-feature auditory processing in six-month-old infants.NeuroImage, 2016; 133, 75-87
• Biffi E, Piazza C, Cavalleri M, Taddeo P, Carcano A, Morandi F, et al. An assistive device for congenital central hypoventilation syndrome outpatients during sleep. Ann Biomed Eng 2014;42(10):2106-2116.
• Alloni A., Lanzola G., Triulzi F.M., Bellazzi R., Reni G., A collaborative environment for shared classification of neuroimages: the experience of the Colibri project, Proc. 37th Annu. Int. Conf. IEEE Eng. Med. Biol. Soc., p. 4306-4309, Milan, Italy, August 25-29, 2015.

Partnerships

• Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy
• CNR-IBFM (National Council of Research – Bioimaging and molecular physiology institute), Segrate, Italia
• CNR- ITIA (National Council of Research – Industrial and automation technologies institute), Milano, Italia
• CNR- ICMATE (National Council of Research – Energy and interphase institute), Lecco, Italia
• CNR- IPCB (National Council of Research – Institute for Polymers, Composites and Biomaterials)
• CNR- IFN (National Council of Research – photonics and nanotechnologies institute)
• CNR- INO (National Council of Research – National Institute of Optics)
• University of Southern California, USA
• Univerlecco, Lecco, Italy
• University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy
• Scuola Superiore S. Anna, Pisa, Italy
• University of Milan, Milan, Italy
• Università Cattolica di Milano, Milan, Italy