The Nightingale Prize for best MBEC paper in 2011

Abstract

The Nightingale Prize is named after Alfred Nightingale who was the first Editor in Chief of Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing, MBEC. He died in 1963 at the age of 40 [17]. He was a promising scientist and pioneer in the field of electromyography [14]. The prize was established in cooperation between the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine and the International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering. Since biomedical engineering papers do not collect citations so fast to allow citation frequency to be used as a selection criterion [12, 18] and the Nightingale prize is intended to recognize a recent paper an alternative procedure was established. The manuscripts that received a priority of 90 % or higher from the reviewers were selected with the exclusion of reviews and original papers with a rather senior author. The final list consisted out of 10 papers that will be recognized by this editorial. The selected winning paper of this year is by Sigal Portnoy, Nicolas Vuillerme, Yohan Payan and Amit Gefen from the department of Biomedical Engineering, Tel Aviv University, Israel. The paper is entitled ‘‘Clinically oriented real-time monitoring of the individual’s risk for deep tissue injury’’ [13]. This is one of the rare submissions where both reviewers not only gave a high score but recommended accept after first reading. The study aimed to formulate a patient-specific biomechanical model that can help in the continuously monitoring of internal tissue stresses in real time based on surface pressure data obtained form paraplegic patients in a wheelchair. The feasibility was tested on real patient data. It is the combination of state of the art numerical modeling and clinical verification that makes this manuscript to a nice example of quality biomedical engineering publication. The reviewers acknowledged that the paper reports on important work in the translation of engineering to clinical science in pressure ulcer prevention. Several papers related to the cardiovascular system were on the short list. Cardiac resynchronization therapy is important in preventing failure of the heart and for this the position of the coronary sinus, CS, lead is important. Corsi et al. [1] developed a method for quantifying CS lead position in the 3D domain throughout the cardiac cycle at implant and at follow-up using chest fluoroscopy. Transesophageal left ventricular electrogram-recording and temporary pacing was developed to improve patient selection for cardiac resynchronization by Heinke et al. [6]. The cardiorespiratory synchrogram is a stroboscopic-based graphical tool for evaluating phase-locking between cardiac and respiratory oscillators. This method was improved by including an adaptive delay in the cardiac oscillator by Kabir et al. [9]. Sola et al. [16] presented first experimental evidence that electrical impedance tomography is capable of measuring pressure pulses directly within the descending aorta and thereby opens the way to an unsupervised method for arterial blood pressure measurement. Westerhof et al. [19] reconstructed aortic pressure from 24-h intra-brachial and simultaneously obtained non-invasive finger pressure in hypertensive and normotensive patients. From these registrations, it was concluded that cardiac oxygen supply is compromised during the night in hypertensive patients. J. A. E. Spaan (&) Department of Biomedical Engineering and Physics, Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: j.a.spaan@amc.uva.nl 1 http://www.ipem.org.uk/ipem_public. 2 http://ifmbe.org/.