Main description:

This book contains most of the papers presented at a meeting held in Riga on two important topics, i.e. the study and modelling of Environmental Health Risk and Biomedical problems. The field of environmental health is defined by the problems faced and by the specific approaches used. These problems include, amongst many others, the treatment and disposal of liquid and airborne wastes, the elimination or reduction of stresses in the workplace, purification of water supplies, the impacts of overpopulation and inadequate or unsafe food supplies, and the development and use of measures to protect hospital and other medical workers from being infected with a variety of diseases. Related topics included in the first part of this volume deal with sessions on environment problems such as air and water contamination; health effects associated with buildings, toxicology and disease studies. Of special interest are the papers on food safety and occupational hazards. The contributions also include research presentations on risk prevention and monitoring. The second part of the book deals with the development of computational tools for the solution of medical and biological problems.The use of mathematical ideas, models and techniques is rapidly growing and is gaining prominence through the biosciences.
Studies are presented on the solution of physiological processes and the very important case of the simulation of cardiovascular systems. One of the most successful areas of bioengineering has been biomechanics and orthopaedics, which are topics studied in several of the papers contained in the volume. The book ends with a section on data acquisition and analysis. This book is aimed at scientists and engineers working in the challenging area of biomedicine and health. It comprises a series of state of the art presentations which describe some of the many advances made in these fields.

Contents:

Contents Part 1 - Environmental Health Section 1: Air pollution Vegetation fires and release of radioactivity into the air; Assessment of diesel particulate matter exposure among underground mine workers; An investigation into the association of ozone with traffic-related air pollutants using a quantile regression approach; A choice experiment approach to the valuation of air pollution in Mashhad, Iran Section 2: Risk prevention and monitoring Multiscale comparison of air quality modeling for an ozone occurrence during the 1996 Paso Del Norte Ozone Campaign; Breaking the connections: reducing and removing environmental health risk in the Canadian nuclear power industry; Disaster management and generational complacency: five crucial lessons; Generic mapping of human activity-based exposure scenarios to petroleum hydrocarbon contaminants in an oil producing area of the Niger Delta region of Nigeria; The development of a model of pandemic preparedness planning utilizing critical success factors from the United States and the European Union Section 3: The built environment and health Thermal comfort in operating rooms: a case study; Modeling vapor intrusion processes and evaluating risks using subslab data; Assessment of fungal contamination in a Portuguese maternity unit; Respiratory toxicity of Aspergillus versicolor: the most common indoor mould in Slovakia; Environmental health issues in the wake of a major earthquake in West Sumatra, Indonesia Section 4: Toxicology analysis Breath odor characteristics after drinking alcoholic beverages and health monitoring; Cell-based bioassay for compounds with prooxidant activity; Synthetic musks fragrances in the aquatic environment: in vitro toxicological studies of their biotransformation and potential negative effects Section 5: Food safety Evaluation of QMRA performance for Listeria monocytogenes in cold smoked salmon; Study of mutagenic effects of a packaging system with oxygen absorbers on sweet bakery products Section 6: Occupational health Work conditions and occupational morbidity in Latvia; Occupational exposure to volatile organic compounds in the Portuguese printing industry; Dioxins in remediation workers Section 7: Ecology and health Eco-biosociocultural H5N1 disease model in Egypt; Some aspects of reproductive health and metabolic disturbances in pregnant women and their newborn in ecologically injurious conditions of an industrial city in the Urals Section 8: Water quality issues Groundwater quality on a waste disposal area due to sand mining activities in Sao Paulo State, Brazil; Ecological effects of underwater destruction of detonators in Lake Ormtjarn, Sweden: the impact from lead Part 2 - Biomedicine Section 9: Cardiovascular system Correlation of morphological parameters with likelihood of thrombus formation in intracranial aneurysms; Dominant EEG frequencies of patients undergoing dobutamine stress test; Numerical evaluation of the slope and intercept of end-systolic pressure-volume relation; Modelling of embolus transport and embolic stroke Section 10: Biomechanics Indoor motion analysis of a subject wearing prosthesis for adaptive snowboarding; Do lateral dominance, body mass, body height and direction of perturbation influence the Lehr's damping ratio, which characterizes the balancing ability on an unstable oscillatory platform?; Synthetic organs for transplant and bio-mimic reactors for process intensification using nano-structured micro-porous materials Section 11: Simulation of physiological processes A dynamic model of the pregnant myometrial fasciculus; Inverse dynamic model of the pupil muscle plant in the simulation of response to sound, stimuli and hippus Section 12: Orthopaedics and bone mechanics Identification of landmarks on lower limb joint from CT images for kinematics studies: a totally semi-automatic procedure; The effect of time on the results of children's spine examinations Section 13: Data acquisition and analysis Association rule derivation for side effects of medical supplies and its application; Estimation of biophysical and functional properties of artery walls from pulse wave measured by photoplethysmography; Statistical parameter estimation and signal classification in cardiovascular diagnosis; MRI: a tool for measuring turbulent intensities in flow systems