13th International Conference on Biomedical Engineering: ICBME 2008, 3-6 December 2008, Singapore (IFMBE Proceedings, 23)

th On behalf of the organizing committee of the 13 International Conference on Biomedical Engineering, I extend our w- mest welcome to you. This series of conference began in 1983 and is jointly organized by the YLL School of Medicine and Faculty of Engineering of the National University of Singapore and the Biomedical Engineering Society (Singapore). First of all, I want to thank Mr Lim Chuan Poh, Chairman A*STAR who kindly agreed to be our Guest of Honour to give th the Opening Address amidst his busy schedule. I am delighted to report that the 13 ICBME has more than 600 participants from 40 countries. We have received very high quality papers and inevitably we had to turndown some papers. We have invited very prominent speakers and each one is an authority in their field of expertise. I am grateful to each one of them for setting aside their valuable time to participate in this conference. For the first time, the Biomedical Engineering Society (USA) will be sponsoring two symposia, ie “Drug Delivery S- tems” and “Systems Biology and Computational Bioengineering”. I am thankful to Prof Tom Skalak for his leadership in this initiative. I would also like to acknowledge the contribution of Prof Takami Yamaguchi for organizing the NUS-Tohoku’s Global COE workshop within this conference. Thanks also to Prof Fritz Bodem for organizing the symposium, “Space Flight Bioengineering”. This year’s conference proceedings will be published by Springer as an IFMBE Proceedings Series.

This volume presents the proceedings of the13th International Conference on Biomedical Engineering (ICBME2008), help from the 3rd to 6th December 2008 in Singapore. The presented papers reflect the broad scope of the conference including topics like:

Artificial Organs, Bioengineering Education, Bioinformatics & Digital Medicine, Biomaterials, Biomechanics, Biomedical Imaging, Biomedical Instrumentation, Biosensors, BioMEMs & Lab-on-Chip, Biosignal Processing, Cardiovascular Bioengineering, Cell & Biomolecular Mechanics, Cellular & Biomolecular Engineering, Clinical Engineering, Computational Bioengineering, Computer-Integrated & Computer-Assisted Surgery, Controlled Drug Delivery, Mechanobiology, Medical Robotics, Micro Nano Biomedical devices & systems, Nanobiotechnology, Neural Systems Engineering, Orthopaedics, Prosthetics & Orthotics, Rehabilitation Engineering & Assistive Technology, Pharmaceutical Sciences & Engineering, Physiological System Modeling, Regenerative Medicine & Tissue Engineering, Telemedicine & Healthcare.