Education
Brain Computer Interface (BCI) Workshop
This workshop ran in 2022 as part of the IEEE EMBS International Student Conference Asia-Pacific, and was ultimately a great success! It was held on 28th September in the Biomedical Engineering Building at the University of Melbourne, and took the 25 attendees through the building blocks of converting neural information into useful commands without any external information other than the neurosignal itself.
Participants all learnt the absolute building blocks of how to decode right foot and left hand motor imagery, and additionally implemented a machine learning model to classify between the two classes. This involved:
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Discussing areas of the brain and how the electrodes arrangement fits onto the head to target specific areas
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How EEG signals in the time domain can be converted into the frequency domain
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The logistics of feature selection
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Creating a dataset that is fit for training a model
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Fitting the model and validating its performance
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All of this was done using Python3 in Google Colabs and involved participants writing a portion of the code.​ If you are interested in checking it out, here is the link to the GitHub, which has the worksheet as well as the answers!
Photos from the day!
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Bioinformatics Workshops
With the emergence of so many new laboratory/clinical technologies, biomedical data is being produced at an unprecedented speed. Bioinformatics involves applying software/computation to process and understand these large sets of data. Our Insight into Bioinformatics workshop series aims to introduce the basics of bioinformatics. Workshop dates and outline in 2021 were as follows:
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Tue 17th Aug - Launch event, featuring guest speakers
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Thu 19th Aug - Workshop 1: Storing and manipulating genetic data using Biopython
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Thu 26th Aug - Workshop 2: Using programming to identifying organisms by their genetic code
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Thu 2nd Sep - Workshop 3: Constructing and interpreting phylogenetic trees
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For more information, check out this Facebook event for the Launch Event, and also this Facebook event for the three-workshop series. Workshops took place online, and you can watch the recordings on our YouTube channel.
If you are interested in checking these workshops out, you can access the GitHub repository, which contains the setup guides and Jupiter Notebook worksheets (with and without solutions).
Beginner Python Workshops
In Semester 1 of 2021, we ran a series of five beginner Python workshops. You can find below the recordings and resources used in these workshops. If you are interested in checking these workshops out, you can access the GitHub repository, which contains the setup guides and Jupiter Notebook worksheets (with and without solutions), as well as the workshop presentation slides.
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Setup
We recommend using the Anaconda distribution and JupyterLab for Python. Instructions on how to set up Anaconda and JupyterLab can be found here.
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Workshop 1 introduces the concept of programming and how it is relevant to the medical technology fields. We also cover some basic terminology and functions in this workshop, such as the print, input, and help functions.
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Workshop 2 introduces the basic data types used in python; strings, integers and floats, and also touches on how to perform mathematical calculations using programming. We go over the concept of assigning and updating variables, and how these can be useful in solving problems.
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Workshop 3 covers Boolean algebra, conditionals, and while loops.
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Workshop 4 shows how to write/utilise functions, and goes through the key libraries that are built into python.
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Workshop 5 concludes our workshop series by introducing some more advanced data types ; lists, tuples, strings and dictionaries, and the different ways these can be manipulated. We also go through for loops, and how it differs from while loops.
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Resources list for further reference
This list contains a compilation of reference sources and problem sets where you can practise your coding skills.
Bioinformatics Workshops
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Python Workshops
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