Starting from XXXVIII Cycle, the following courses are specifically available for students enrolled in the Tech4Health program. For more detailed information regarding each course (schedule, delivery method, prerequisites, etc.), students are encouraged to contact the course instructor directly. Typically, Tech4Health courses are delivered during the summer months (June, July and September).
1. DEDICATED COURSE OFFERING:
Specific courses for Tech4Health students will be communicated through official channels.
In addition, each year a Google Form is sent to all students to gather their preferences regarding the Tech4Health courses they are interested in. This helps instructors better organize and tailor the courses based on the number of interested participants.
2. SEMINARS AND UPDATES:
In addition to the main courses, further seminars and training events are planned. Information about these will be shared in the News&Event section of the website, or sent directly via institutional email.
3. ADDITIONAL TRAINING OPPORTUNITIES:
All PhD students are also encouraged to attend transversal skills courses and other educational activities offered by the University of Brescia: cross-cutting skills and other training opportunities.
4. COLLABORATIONS WITH OTHER PhD PROGRAMS:
Courses offered by other PhD programs at the University are also available, including (but not limited to):
Additionally, students may access courses organized by the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, particularly those offered by the PhD programs in Biorobotics and Emerging Digital Technologies.
IMPORTANT – Recognition of External Training Activities
To fulfill the requirement of 60 training hours for each PhD student, it is possible to attend courses outside the Tech4Health program. However, these external activities are NOT automatically recognized.
Therefore, students must:
- Obtain a certificate of attendance for each external course they complete.
- Send a formal request for approval to the program coordinator (Prof. Mauro Serpelloni), who will submit it to the Faculty Board for evaluation.
The Faculty Board may approve the following activities:
- External courses
- Summer schools
- Project works
Technology for Health INTERNAL COURSES
| Printed Electronics The course aims to develop competences printing electronics, paying particular attention to techniques, materials, instrument for characterization, through practical experiences. | Prof. Mauro Serpelloni (5 hours) |
| Rheology of Complex Fluids: Principles and Basic Measurements Rheology is a branch of mechanics that studies the deformation and flow of matter. Though, in principle, rheology includes everything dealing with flow behavior (aeronautics, hydraulics and even solid mechanics), in practice it is restricted to liquids whose response cannot be successfully addressed by referring to the continuum mechanics approaches. Such liquids, characterized by a complex structure, exhibit unusual flow behaviors and even counterintuitive phenomena. This category includes many important liquids, such as polymer melts, paints, inks, foods, and also biological fluids as synovial fluid, mucus and blood. This short course introduces PhD students to the principles of rheology and to the basic measurements for the rheological characterization of complex fluids. The rheological response of some fluids of special interest for the biomedical field will be also discussed. | Prof. Francesco Baldi (4 hours) |
| Advanced Methods for Studying Molecular Interactions Among the various aspects that characterize precision medicine, the high selectivity of the drugs to be developed or already currently used in this biomedical field is particularly important. In turn, the selectivity and specificity of a drug implies its ability to interact with its pathological target (proteins/nucleic acids) with high affinity. These considerations suggest the importance of suitable methodologies for studying biomolecular interactions, which are fundamental for making the “drug discovery” process more efficient. With this in mind, the most recent developments of this type of study in the virtual and experimental fields will be considered in this course. | Prof. Marco Rusnati | Prof. Pasqualina D’Ursi (4 hours) |
| Biomedical Impedance Systems Prof. Oscar Casas The course aims to describe the principles of operation of bioimpedance systems intended for the non-invasive measurement of physiological parameters; the course will provide information on the design of electronic interfaces for bioimpedance systems, and the methods used to evaluate their performance. | Prof. Oscar Casas (4 hours) |
| An introduction to Abstract Argumentation The course lies in the field of artificial intelligence and in particular of formal argumentation, a research area which aims at providing a computational counterpart to the argumentative aspects which are pervasive in many human activities like reasoning and dialogues. In particular the course will provide an introduction to the theory of abstract argumentation frameworks, discussing its basic concepts and analyzing in detail the notion of abstract argumentation semantics, with a coverage of the general properties characterizing different semantics and of the main proposals available in the literature. After covering these foundational aspects, the final part of the course will give an overview of various research trends devoted to developing and extending the basic abstract argumentation model. | Prof. Pietro Baroni (3 hours) |
| Introduction to Blockchain Technology and Healthcare Use Cases Prof. Michele Melchiori The course aims to present the basic concepts of blockchain technology and examine some application cases in the healthcare field (e.g., HR on blockchain, applications for clinical trials) and discuss their potential advantages, limitations, possible research areas. The topics covered will be: introduction, concepts and definitions, functionalities, healthcare applications and research challenges. | Prof. Michele Melchiori (4 hours) |
| Detecting and Decoding EMG Signals for Understanding the Neural Control of Movement The course will focus on the recording and analysis of single and multichannel electromyographic (EMG) signals for the decoding of voluntary movements in humans. Current state-of-the-art technology and algorithms for the reliable identification and processing of EMG signals will be presented, as well as applications of EMG in healthy and disease conditions. | Prof. Francesco Negro (4 hours) |
| Computer Aided Surgery Prof. Nicola Francesco Lopomo Computer-assisted surgery (CAS) represents a surgical concept and set of methods, which use the enabling technologies of information engineering for surgical planning and to guide or perform surgeries. The course aims to give the foundations relating to the specifications of the CAS systems, paying attention to tracking technologies, planning solutions, multimodality management, and the implementation of the intervention (also using robotic technology). | Prof. Nicola Francesco Lopomo (5 hours) |
| Knowledge Graphs: Fundamentals This course provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to knowledge graphs, which have recently garnered notable attention from both industry and academia. Knowledge graphs are founded on the principle of applying a graph-based abstraction to data, and are now broadly deployed in scenarios that require using data management techniques for integrating and extracting value from multiple, diverse sources of data at large scale. In this course we define knowledge graphs and provide a high-level overview of how they are used. We present and contrast popular graph models that are commonly used to represent data as graphs, and the languages by which they can be queried before describing how the resulting data graph can be enhanced with notions of schema, identity, and context. We will further discusses how ontologies and rules can be used to encode knowledge as well as how inductive techniques based on statistics, graph analytics, etc. can be used to encode and extract knowledge. It covers techniques for the creation, enrichment, assessment, and refinement of knowledge graphs and surveys recent open and enterprise knowledge graphs and the industries or applications within which they have been most widely adopted. This course closes by discussing the current limitations and future directions along which knowledge graphs are likely to evolve. To make the course accessible for newcomers, running examples and graphical notation are used throughout. Formal definitions and extensive references are also provided for those who opt to delve more deeply into specific topics. | Prof. Anisa Rula (5 hours) |
| Sustainability Evaluation of Technology Efforts to contribute to the development of sustainable technologies can be concentrated in different directions. However, there is no single definition of “sustainable technology”. In particular, the energy and materials involved are fundamental factors for increasing the sustainability of technologies and, in particular, new materials play a fundamental role in this area. This course introduces some concepts on the assessment of the sustainability of emerging technologies, based on energy and emissions analysis, with great attention to new materials. With a view to sustainable development, it allows you to understand the importance of an adequate choice of materials. | Prof. Elza Bontempi | Dr. Giulio Oliviero (6 hours) |
| Internet of Things for Smart Cities and Communities The course is focused on the understanding of possible architecture of the Internet of Things applied to distributed measurement systems for health and care applications in the smart city. The problem of system interoperability, big data collection, making city digital twins and interaction with buildings, putting men in the automation loop, will be analyzed. | Prof. Paolo Bellagente (6 hours) |
| Regulatory Aspects for Certification of Medical Devices The course deals with the main aspects related to legislation and to the more general regulatory aspects to be faced in order to obtain certification for medical devices. Particular attention will be given to the “Medical Device Regulation” and examples related to real applications will be addressed. | Prof. Corrado Paganelli (4 hours) |