Description in Science and Engineering can be such a tool. While the preface indicates âthis book is an introduction to the ... and Healthcare Applications in LabVIEW ... rial at hand, followed by reasonable coverage of the applications.
Book Reviews Information Measures: Information and its Description in Science and Engineering
Edited by Christoph Arndt. Springer-Verlag, 2001. ISBN 3-540-41633-1, xix +547 pp., $149. Communication theory and information theory are the roots of the newly emerged field of bioinformatics. Bioinformaticians are facing the challenge of how to handle immense amounts of raw data, such as are generated from genome mapping, make sense of them, and render them accessible to scientists working on a wide variety of problems. Information Measures: Information and its Description in Science and Engineering can be such a tool. While the preface indicates “this book is an introduction to the mathematical description of information in science and engineering,” it also consists of comprehensive discussions of information measures. More importantly, the author treats “the necessary mathematical theory in a more vivid way than in the usual theoretical proof structure.” This will help the readers to understand the connections between different information measures and the trains of thought involved in their derivation. As there are a great number of different possible ways to describe information, it is necessary to present these measures in a coherent manner. The author did this well. Among several information measures examined, the book includes Shannon information, applied in coding theory; Akaike information criterion, used in system identification to determine auto-regressive models and in neural networks to identify the number of neurons; and Cramer-Rao bound or Fisher information, describing the minimal variances achieved by unbiased estimators. The text consist of 16 chapters and an appendix, starting with “Introduction” (1), then followed “Basic considerations” (2), “Historic development of information theory” (3), “The concept of entropy in physics” (4), “Extension of Shannon’s information” (5), “Generalized entropy measures” (6), “Information functions and Gaussian distributions” (7), “Shannon’s information on discrete probability distributions” (8), “Information functions for Gaussian distributions Part II” (9), “Bounds of the variance” (10), “Ambiguity function” (11), “Akaike’s information criterion” (12), “Channel information” (13), “‘Deterministic’ and stochastic information” (14), “Maximum entropy estimation” (15), and then ending with “Concluding remarks” (16). If this book had some practical examples both in telecommunications and bioinformatics, I would recommend it for use as a supplementary text for advanced courses of a senior-level to graduate-level class. As it is, it is useful for researchers in telecommunications, bioinformatics, physics, and the like. —Wangcai Liao, Ph.D.
the basic physiology of the systems under study. After a quick overview in chapters 1 and 2 of basics, the text begins a series of application oriented chapters. Biopotentials are covered in Chapter 3, followed by examples involving cardiopulmonary dynamics (4) and cardiopulmonary applications (5). Machine vision and motion control applications are given an overview in Chapter 6, followed by medical device testing in Chapter 7. Regulations and the use of LabVIEW in a regulated environment are covered in Chapter 8. Healthcare information management systems comprise Chapter 9, with executive dashboards as a natural extension of this in Chapter 10. The text concludes with chapters on mathematical modeling, LabVIEW, and the Internet, and examples of future applications. Most of the chapters have a fairly terse introduction to the material at hand, followed by reasonable coverage of the applications involving LabVIEW. Most of the chapters have inserts of related example applications of the technology. Examples of these independent solution articles involve counting of particles, studies of eye motion, automatic testing of ventilators, and the like. The included CD has code examples for these examples and sections of the text as well as a number of demonstrations. This text is strongly recommended as a reference text for students in biomedical engineering instrumentation and laboratory courses, both undergraduate and graduate. It is also recommended for students working on independent study or design courses involving bioinstrumentation. It is also recommended as a reference for those new to the field of bioinstrumentation and needing an introduction to rapid prototyping of instruments. It is a good supplement to a basic instrumentation text. —Paul King Vanderbilt University
Virtual Bio-Instrumentation: Biomedical, Clinical, and Healthcare Applications in LabVIEW
By Jon B. Olansen and Eric Rosow, Prentice Hall, 2002, ISBN: 0-13-065216-4, 603 pp, $79.00 This paperback with CD examples is meant to give an overview of what can be done with the LabVIEW environment. It does this very well. The text is aimed at biomedical and healthcare professionals who already understand the basics of A/D conversion, data collection and analysis, medical instrumentation basics, and 176
IEEE ENGINEERING IN MEDICINE AND BIOLOGY
September/October 2002
