Office of Research Services (ORS)

Research Chairs: Sridhar Krishnan

Canada Canada Research Chair in Biomedical Signal Analysis

Ryerson University
Tier 2 - October 1, 2007
Natural Sciences and Engineering

416-979-5334
krishnan@ee.ryerson.ca

Website
http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/people/Krishnan.html

Research Involves

Analyzing physiological signals to design more accurate and less costly ways to diagnose health problems and plan treatment regimes.

Research Relevance

Providing another tool for physicians to use when diagnosing underlying medical problems, thereby helping ensure medical conditions are properly treated and giving patients peace of mind about the accuracy of their diagnosis.

Vital Signals: Understanding Secret Signs of Medical Conditions

A cough often tells us that something is wrong?but is it just a cold, or the start of something worse? Often, our doctor will tell us to keep an eye on it and come back if it gets worse. Even in simple matters like this, monitoring the signals we get from our body helps us, and our doctors, figure out what ails us. But what if our body was sending out even more important signals about our health all the time?

As Canada Research Chair in Biomedical Signal Analysis, Dr. Sridhar Krishnan looks for those signals, and he looks forward to a day when knee disorders, for example, can be detected without invasive surgery, or throat cancer can be diagnosed through the human voice.

We already rely on signals for a lot: when we monitor a cough we usually watch two things?how strong it is, and how often it happens. Krishnan measures frequency and intensity, too, but in a far more exact and specialized way. Take an arthritic knee: when bent, it emits a sound that can be measured by highly precise instruments that pay attention to the high and low points of the sound's frequency, as well as the intervals between that sound and the next.

Different sorts of injuries produce different types of time-frequency patterns, and with the right instruments and the right base of knowledge, a doctor might be able to diagnose the location of a knee problem without using expensive and invasive arthroscopy, a procedure where a fibre-optic probe inspects the cartilage surface.

By experimenting with this method and refining related technology and procedures, Krishnan will pioneer new ways to diagnose a variety of illnesses and plan their treatment. His discoveries might complement traditional means of diagnosis, making them all the more accurate, or even replace old methods with less invasive and less costly procedures, helping Canadians have confidence that their health problem has been correctly diagnosed, and putting them on the right track to recovery.