From thirty years ago, a lot of Biomedical engineering equipments are rapidly introduced in clinical field. They are sophisticated and indispensable for modern medicine. Recently some accidents related to biomedical equipments are reported in Japan. The ministry of health, labour and welfare is trying to change the curriculum for clinical engineering technologists. We think that the basic engineering is the most important for them, because many sophisticated new equipments are introduced very rapidly. But the ministry tends to change the education system not suitable for teaching basic engineering. At this time, we think that it is very important to discuss the situation of clinical engineering technicians in various countries and their roles in future.

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In recent years medical accidents have reported frequently. It is important that promoting studies of safety in medical care systems for preventing accidents. In this paper, the authors describe some consideration on medical safety control studied after the aviation safety frameworks. And points for prevention of medical accident in surgery or clinical examination were discussed.

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The medical information is originally based on the goal of treatment. Therefore, we do not forget the goal of treatment gives priority over the research purpose when it is used for research. Moreover, when the diagnosis and treatment information is used for the research, it is necessary to follow an international guideline and the guideline of Japan based on it. To execute an international guideline in Japan, we must make the guidelline of Japan from the standpoint of “correspondence possibility of the site”. But, these international guidelines originally demand an immediate reform of the site in Japan. Therefore when we will execute our research according to a low interpretation, it will result into denial of our researching. Today, we are required to review a current method on the assumption of the protection of individual information, and to restructure it. Especially, it is required to examine “Complete count survey” done by the epidemiologic study etc. fundamentally again.

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Medical engineering plays important role in current medical care system, Whereas, legal aspect of incidents in clinical instrument operation have not been analyzed. This paper describes legal aspect of medical malpractice and negligence in medical instrument operation. Based on a case of incident that was concerned with a clinical engineer of a hospital, problems were analyzed from legal point of view.

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Basic Life Support (BLS) is a rudimentary reanimation by common citizen. The execution of BLS improves lifesaving rate of Advanced Cardiac Life Support. Recently, the importance of the cardiopulmonary resuscitation education came to be pointed out in Japan. In this paper, the transition of the resuscitation technology is described. Next, the current state of the resuscitation is discussed. Finally, problems of resuscitation technology to be solved near future are also discussed.

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In connection with the trends of the world, Japan experienced the dawn of biomedical engineering in the former half of the 1960's. Since then, biomedical engineering in Japan has certainly made a great progress. However, there seems to have been some critical problems peculiar to Japan. In this commentary paper, we refer to such problems, and propose ways to solve them to some extent.

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Using a transient transfection assay system, we have recently demonstrated that curved DNA that mimics a negative supercoil can activate transcription by influencing chromatin structure. To know whether this phenomenon is general, we investigated the effect of the DNA curvature on transcription in an episomal assay system. It was confirmed that the left-handedly curved DNA can activate transcription even in the episomal system. Furthermore, it was found that conversion of the TATA sequence in the reporter constructs from the original non-canonical sequence to the canonical one considerably elevated transcription from the control template and, as the result, diminished the difference in promoter activity between the control reporter and the reporters containing the left-handedly curved DNA, indicating that transcriptional activation by the DNA curvature is more evident when the TATA box is not optimized.

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Single phase natural convection loop was experimentally and numerically investigated. The rectangular loop (approximately 0.42m high and wide) made of the pyrex glass tube (inner diameter of 0.03m) is oriented in a vertical plane, heated over the lower horizontal branch, cooled on the upper horizontal branch and thermally insulated on both right and left vertical branch. Working fluids are water and four kinds of silicone oils with different viscosity. Water and silicone oils KF96-1, KF96-2 (Shin-Etsu Chemical) with the nearest viscosity of water showed unstable oscillation with chaotic flow reversal. This phenomenon was observed in silicone oils for the first time. Unstable oscillation occurred in the heat flux ranged from 11.0-23.4kW/m² in water, 9.65-13.8kW/m² in KF96-1 and 15.2kW/m²- in KF96-2. The stability map for laminar flow is constructed based on one-dimensional model. In comparison between this map and experimental results, the agreement is much improved when heat transfer coefficient and viscosity coefficient are multiplied by some factors (over 10). It was concluded that the eddy viscosity influenced on these factor. Also, another stability map was constructed in Prandtl number vs heat flux. It reveals unstable oscillation occurs in the turbulent flow region.

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Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) are one of promising future power generators. The application of SOFCs used to be mainly envisaged as mediam scale power plants. However, in recent years, new materials and concepts for SOFCs were proposed and substantiated. Concequently, new applications of SOFCs have gotten a lot of attention. In this paper, those new trends in SOFC technologies are reviewed.

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A brief explanation of isotope effects that are quantum mechanical effects and their theoretical foundation are given. Application of molecular orbital calculations to the elucidation of isotope effects is briefly reviewed with two examples.

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