Chateando con la Ciencia: Pablo Laguna
Chateando con la Ciencia: “The bioelectrical signals of the heart: origin, decoding and application”
On Thursday 17th March a new session of the VI edition of the “Chateando con la Ciencia” series of talks will take place, organised by the Real Zaragoza Tennis Club with the collaboration of the Instituto de Nanociencia y Materiales de Aragón, INMA (CSIC-University of Zaragoza) with a talk by Pablo Laguna, Professor of Signal Theory in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Communications at the University of Zaragoza.
We have undoubtedly seen in some film that monitor on a hospital bed showing biomedical signals that accelerate, disappear, change abruptly, or suddenly reappear. Or “magic” watches, which tell us how our body is doing, whether we are stressed, over-trained, and of course what our heart rate, or blood oxygenation level is. Other “devices” tell us how we have slept or how our heart is doing, etc. etc. etc. But what are they, how are they measured, how are they interpreted, what are they for, the biomedical signals? In this talk we will get closer to the answers to these questions and we will see how these signals inform about the biological systems that generate them. We will see that they are not easy to read because of noise generated by signals from other interacting organs, or because what we are looking for is not visible to the human eye, and we will also see how these problems can be mitigated. Knowledge of the physiology that governs signal generation is key to scrutinising what the signals are telling us. We will approach how to interpret the language of signals, and we will look at some examples such as atrial fibrillation (why do we take anti-coagulants if atrial fibrillation is an electrical problem?), and how the autonomic nervous system (ANS) controls and interacts with them.
Pablo Laguna is Professor of Signal Theory in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Communications at the School of Engineering and Architecture of Aragon, and director of the Aragon Institute for Engineering Research (I3A), both at the University of Zaragoza. He is also a member of the Centro en red de Investigación en Ingeniería Biomédica, Biomateriales y Nanomedicina, CIBER-BBN, of the Instituto de Salud Carlos III, and leads a research group on biomedical signal interpretation and physiology-guided computational simulation (BSICoS). He is co-author of more than 180 research articles, more than 300 papers in international conferences and has supervised 18 PhD theses. He has led a large number of biomedical signal interpretation projects, especially in the cardiovascular field, most of them with international collaborations in clinical and engineering centres. He is editor of the journals Digital Signal Processing (Eurasip) and Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing (Springer). He has been chairman of the board of the Computing in Cardiology Society. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, EAMBES, and IAMBE. Together with L. Sörnmo he is co-author of the book “Bioelectrical Signal Processing in Cardiac and Neurological Aplication” (Elsevier, 2005).
In order to access the talk, an access code must be requested to the following e-mail address: palacio@unizar.es before 15 March 2022.
