A phase locking value (PLV) in electrocorticography is an essential indicator for analysis of cognitive activities and detection of severe diseases such as seizure of epilepsy. The PLV computation requires a simultaneous pursuit of high-throughput and low-cost implementation in hardware acceleration. The PLV computation consists of bandpass filtering, Hilbert transform, and mean phase coherence (MPC) calculation. The MPC calculation includes trigonometric functions and divisions, and these calculations require a lot of computational amounts. This paper proposes an MPC calculation method that removes high-cost operations from the original MPC with mathematically identical derivations while the conventional methods sacrifice either computational accuracy or throughput. This paper also proposes a hardware implementation of MPC calculator whose latency is 21 cycles and pipeline interval is five cycles. Compared with the conventional implementation with the same standard cell library, the proposed implementation marks 2.8 times better hardware implementation efficiency that is defined as throughput per gate counts.

This work elucidates the evolution of three generations of the laboratory information system in the National Taiwan University Hospital, which were respectively implemented in an IBM Series/1 minicomputer, a client/server and a plug-and-play HL7 interface engine environment respectively. The experience of using the HL7 healthcare information exchange in the hospital information system, laboratory information system, and automatic medical instruments over the past two decades are illustrated and discussed. The latest design challenge in developing intelligent laboratory information services is to organize effectively distributed and heterogeneous medical instruments through the message gateways. Such experiences had spread to some governmental information systems for different purposes in Taiwan; besides, the healthcare information exchange standard, software reuse mechanism, and application service provider adopted in developing the plug-and-play laboratory information system are also illustrated.

A new model for a computer simulation of RF capacitive type hyperthermia has been developed by taking account of the following points. Blood flow is usually determined by many physiological parameters, but is regarded as a function of only blood temperature under some conditions. The temperature dependence of blood flow of tumors and normal tissues is assumed by referring the data obtained by Song et al. and Tanaka. The blood temperature which is elevated by externally applied power significantly affects temperatures of the body and the tumors. The transport of heat from the body surface is studied by considering air convection. These points are examined by experiments on a computer with simple phantom models and real patients. The results of simulation on the patient have shown a good agreement with clinical inspection based on CT images and a temperature of the stomach.