Event
Thomas McAvoy, "Biomedical Process Control: An Emerging Research Area"
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
11:00 a.m.
2110 Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Building
Rebecca Copeland
301 405 6602
Abstract
One excellent area to which advanced process control can be applied is the biomedical area. Biomedical process control is rich with interesting and challenging problems. Solving these problems can have a significant medical as well as economic impact. When a physician administers a drug or carries out a medical procedure he/she is basically acting as a control engineer. The physicians goal is to achieve a therapeutic objective, and their manipulated variable is often the drug delivery schedule that they prescribe. This seminar will discuss typical applications within the area of biomedical process control. The specific applications discussed include: dynamics of the anticoagulant drug heparin, feedback control of a radiation couch position to compensate for breathing induced tumor motion, and automatic detection of bacteria on pathology slides.
About Dr. McAvoy
Thomas J. McAvoy is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and a former joint-appointment faculty member of the Institute for Systems Research.
Throughout his career, Dr. McAvoy's research has focused on process control, specifically control system operability, distillation control, smart sensing, the integration of process design and control, and application of multivariate statistical methods. Dr. McAvoy also has research interests in artificial intelligence, specifically, neural networks, including combining them with expert systems.
He received his Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University in 1964. In 1980 he began teaching at the University of Maryland and received his research faculty appointment to ISR in 1985.
Professor McAvoy earned the Allied Foundation Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Education in 1982 and the Donald P. Eckman Education Award in 1987. He was on the Editorial Board for Instrumentation Technology from 1983 to 1987, the Editorial Board of I&EC Research from 1989-92, Associate Editor and North America Editor for Automatica, and was a co-chairman in 1986 for Chemical Process Control 111. He also served as Editor in Chief for the Journal of Process Control.
In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) "for contributions to process control, particularly pioneering work on neural network applications, and for service as Editor in Chief of the Journal of Process Control."
