Prestigious award for best paper in biomedical signal processing

Dr Javier Escudero and Dr Hamed Azami from the Institute for Digital Communications (IDCOM), in collaboration with Dr Alberto Fernández (from the Laboratory of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, Spain) have received the prestigious Nightingale Award for the best paper published in 2017 in Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing.

The research published in the paper, whose title is "Refined multiscale fuzzy entropy based on standard deviation for biomedical signal analysis", is part of Hamed’s PhD, which was supervised by Dr Javier Escudero in the area of biomedical signal processing. The research focused on developing entropy-based signal analysis methods for characterization of electrophysiological brain activity, paying close attention to the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.

In particular, Hamed's thesis proposed a number of signal analysis methods to study the level of predictability and complexity of human brain activity. The awarded paper contributed to the definition of new metrics, its interpretation in terms of straightforward signal processing concepts, and their application to characterise magnetoencephalogram brain activity in Alzheimer’s disease, one of the most important neurological conditions in the world and the most common form of dementia in the UK. The original article by Hamed Azami, Alberto Fernández and Javier Escudero was the one recognised with this award out of more than 160 publications in the journal in 2017.

The Nightingale Award

The Nightingale Award is made by the Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing journal in association with the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine and the International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering.

This annual prize is awarded to the best scientific paper published each year in the Journal.

Those papers eligible for consideration for the prize are determined based on scores received from external referees. The manuscripts eligible for the prize are sent to all members of the Editorial Board of the Journal who rank them in terms of quality of scientific content and interest.

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