eNIFE - Biomedical Engineering

The unique selling point of NIFE, in the form of the bundled technical and intellectual infrastructure, offers various WGs the possibility of knowledge transfer between the groups of the MHH and LUH, as well as collaborations that would or might never have been established in this way. These include research activities in the area of the development of bioreactor systems for bioartificial vascular prostheses, the development of novel processor architectures for digital hearing aids, the conceptual design of novel low-energy hearing aid processors, the development of mobile diagnostic systems for the assessment of sensorimotor regulatory capabilities, as well as the development of safety-integrated and infection-reactive implants.

In the state-sponsored project SmartBiotecs work is being done on sensor technology and associated electronics for bioreactor systems in cooperation with colleagues from various NIFE WGs, . The bioreactor systems should, for example, make it possible to grow bioartificial vascular prostheses from autologous cells in vitro in cooperation with the Blume/Scheeper group. The success of such complex projects must first be fundamentally researched and is dependent on many different process steps and parameter settings. In order to be able to monitor and adjust these as extensively as possible and to control them as automatically as possible, the use of various sensors with the underlying signal processing and diverse actuators is being investigated. The human cells used require very precise environmental conditions, such as high humidity, which makes the use of many electronic components difficult, therefore another focus lies on the encapsulation of commercially available electronics. Both the conceptual design and the implementation of the necessary hardware and software components are carried out by the eNIFE group. In the field of sensor and measurement technology, novel physical and chemical sensor principles and measurement systems for the fast detection of smallest substance concentrations in liquids and gases (air), mainly for medical, bio-, environmental and safety applications, are investigated. Basic scientific questions are investigated and application-oriented research projects are carried out in close cooperation with scientific, clinical and industrial partners. In the field of image processing, projects are carried out for image analysis and visualization of raw data from different imaging methods. The range here extends from the visualization of the finest structures at the cellular level to the analysis of migration movements of endoprostheses.

In the Cluster of Excellence Hearing4all 2.0 Leibniz Universität Hannover, Hannover Medical School and the University of Oldenburg are jointly researching ways to improve hearing for the 18 percent of the population, including more than 50 percent of those over 65, who suffer from hearing loss that requires treatment. By improving individualized hearing diagnostics and the subsequent fitting of personal hearing aids, the scientists of the eNIFE WGs are researching ways to significantly improve the communication situation of those affected, whether at work, in traffic or at home. To this end, this interdisciplinary project is working on high-performance and loss-optimized processor architectures for electronic hearing systems such as cochlear implants or hearing aids. The benefit and acceptance of such hearing aids can only be guaranteed if the complex technical boundary conditions are met. These boundary conditions include miniaturized designs, very short latencies in audio signal processing and, in particular, an extremely limited power dissipation budget in order to achieve long battery runtimes. At the same time, modern and powerful algorithms for digital hearing aids require high computing power.

The need for high-performance and extremely low-loss processor architectures for digital hearing aids is addressed by the project Smart HeaP . To this end, a working group of eNIFE is designing a fully programmable ASIP (Application Specific Instruction Set Processor) architecture and implementing it as a low-energy hearing aid processor. By using a design environment, the chip to be developed will be fully high-level language programmable and thus be enabling algorithmic advancement.

In the biomedical engineering cooperation project D-Sense DL one of the eNIFE WGs is developing a mobile diagnostic system for assessing sensorimotor regulatory ability. This system, consisting of several inertial sensors and specially developed algorithms, makes it possible to perform various sensorimotor test procedures oneself, without the guidance of a trained tester. Such systems can be used for self-testing in the field of sports medicine or rehabilitation medicine with a small number of personnel.

The Collaborative Research Center/Transregional Collaborative Research Center 298 "SIIRI: Safety-integrated and infection-reactive implants". transfers concepts for monitoring stress and damage from manufacturing and material technology to medical implants. In this way, the research is intended to increase implant and thus also patient safety in the long term. In the sub-project "New measurement methods for loosening diagnostics of hip endoprostheses", the main objective is to develop non-invasive methods to detect implant loosening in a differentiated manner and at a very early stage in order to avoid irreversible bone damage and thus improve the revision situation. The concept includes the innovative combination of acoustic emission analysis to characterize the anchorage status of hip endoprostheses and a rapid on-site detection of specific particles and biomolecules in body fluids using ion mobility spectrometry with electrospray ionization, pyrolysis and gas chromatographic pre-separation. In another subproject, "Detection of cell occupancy on cochlear implants and implant position for atraumatic insertion and long-term monitoring of stimulation efficiency," the goal is to develop a new method based on impedance spectrometry to analyze cell occupancy on cochlear implant stimulation electrodes and predict electrode geometry. This method should also allow monitoring of implant position during insertion and long-term stimulation efficiency. This will involve measuring impedances between all cochlear electrodes and using them to validate a finite element model (FEM) to determine and validate a model-based in silico correlation between electrode impedances, cochlear implant position, and cell occupancy.