Institution: Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering, NH, USA.

Title: From Lab to Clinic: The Promise and Challenges of EIT in Cancer Applications

Ryan Halter, is an Associate Professor of Engineering and Biomedical Engineering Program Area lead at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering. Dr. Halter studied engineering sciences and mechanics, and biomedical engineering at Pennsylvania State University and at Dartmouth. He holds an adjunct faculty appointment in the Department of Surgery at Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine where he is also a member of the Translational Engineering in Cancer Research Program at the Dartmouth Cancer Center. The Halter Lab primarily focuses on developing technologies that lie at interface between medical practice and engineering with a focus on enabling clinicians to better detect, diagnose, stage, treat, and monitor patients with a variety of pathologies. The two primary research thrusts explored in his lab include 1) bioimpedance-based clinical technologies and 2) novel surgical navigation frameworks…and sometimes these thrusts overlap! The Halter Lab has been NIH-funded for the last 15 years, and Halter has co-founded several companies working to translate technologies from the lab to the bedside.

Institution: Institue of Physics of BUAP, Puebla, MEXICO.

Title: FFT-Impedance spectroscopy for the analysis of biological and energy systems changing in time.

In 2010 he received his PhD degree at the Institute for Inorganic Chemistry of the University of Kiel, in Germany. From then, and until December of 2013, he was the leader of battery research at the Institute for Materials Science of the same university. From January 2014 he is Professor at the Institute of Physics of BUAP, in Puebla, Mexico, where he has been the coordinator of the programs of graduate studies on Materials Science until November 2024. He is the leader of the Energy Laboratory, and of the research group “Low Dimensionality Structures”, of the same institution. His main research area is the development of micro- and nano-structured materials for Energy Conversion and Storage, microelectronics, sensing and Bio-applications. He has published over 65 scientific papers in these topics in international journals, belonging to the National Researchers System (SNII) with category 2. From March 2017 to November 2024 he has been the representative of the Mexican Energy Storage Network, and from 2021, he is a technical counselor of the Energy Agency of the State of Puebla, México.

Institution: University of Illinois Chicago. USA.

Title: Taking the pressure off from hemodynamic monitoring

Wearable technologies have grown exponentially and are revolutionizing the landscape of healthcare. These technologies offer the opportunity to reduce health disparities and optimize patient outcomes through earlier diagnosis, more accurate predictions, and more personalized treatment. I will present my group's research to generate new wearables to fight cardiovascular diseases and address the unmet clinical need of comfortable cuffless blood pressure (BP) monitoring. 

Dr. Sanchez Terrones is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Richard and Loan Hill Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago. As an NIH and NSF funded researcher, his lab's broad research on digital health technologies and wearables focuses on addressing highly prevalent global chronic conditions.

Institution: Institut für Bioprozess- und Analysenmesstechnik e.V., Rosenhof 1, 37308 Heilbad Heiligenstadt

Title: Single Chip Solution for electrical characterization 

Electrochemical impedance is useful for material characterization and becomes particularly interesting when the measurement is fast and the instrumentation is simple and inexpensive. Methods in the time domain are superior, especially with regard to speed, since measurements do not require sweeping though the frequency range. Instead, a broadband signal is applied and the response of the system is measured, from which the electrical properties can be derived. Of the possible broadband signals such as step functions, Dirac surge, multisine, maximum length sequence or chirp, the step function has the best potential for a quick measurement with simple hardware. In biological materials, the response to a step in potential or current is a sum of exponential functions or, for a simpler interpretation, a distribution of relaxation times. The electrode polarization that often occurs in measurements on biological systems leads to a √t -dependency. Generally, the response to a step is a rapid change in current or voltage immediately after the step, with significant deceleration thereafter. With a frequency range of five orders of magnitude and the fulfilment of the sampling theorem, equidistant sampling would require at least 200.000 sampling points, which is problematic for continuous monitoring of an object. Gradual sampling with short intervals when the signal changes quickly and correspondingly longer times when changes are slowly reduces the necessary sampling points considerably, but leads to a violation of the sampling theorem. We avoid this by a stepwise integration between two sampling points, which yields an adaptive anti-aliasing filter. In current work, about 30 sampling points are needed for a complete reconstruction of the relaxation behaviour over a dynamic range of six orders of magnitude (500 ns - 50 ms). This corresponds to a spectrum between 10 Hz - 1 MHz when evaluating a single step. An ASIC was developed for the required hardware, which, in addition to a universal front end, also contains the entire timing control and the analog-to-digital conversion. To validate the concept, we made a discrete circuit with exactly the functionality of the ASIC. Its analogue part allows the use of 2, 3 and 4 electrode systems and the choice between potentiostatic and galvanostatic excitation. 

Various work regimes are implemented, where the single step allows the fastest measurement. For biological or electrochemical applications, the multiple step method is provided, in which a charge balance with positive and negative potentials is achieved. For precise measurements a sampling principle is implemented, in which an offset-free square wave is applied and the integration time is increased with each positive step.  A three-electrode arrangement with automatic compensation of the zero current potential is available especially for electrochemical applications. 

.