Other Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons^™

Left Atrial Appendage Printing Process, Areli Reyes, Brandon James Mukai, Mia Noelle Von Knorring

Biomedical Engineering

The left atrial appendage senior design team aims to assist in closing off the left atrial appendage that is susceptible to coagulation due to non-valvular atrial fibrillation. Coagulation in the left atrial appendage (LAA) can be life threatening as it can lead to a stroke. Dr. Chris Porterfield performs a procedure that uses the Boston Scientific Watchman to close the appendage. He finds that sizing the Watchman properly is difficult with limited visuals from live CT scans. He proposed converting the CT scans into a 3D printed model of the left atrial appendage and left atrium so he can visually …

Insulative (Direct Current) Dielectrophoretic Foul-Less Filtration In Microfuidic Systems, Matthew A A Whitman

Master's Theses

Filtration is a technology that is used almost ubiquitously in society from uses raging from filtration of macroparticles from water to pharmaceutical grade filtration products to remove anything larger than a protein. However, with such a wide range of uses, most filtration products have the same issue; membrane clogging (fouling) that prevents continuous use and requires frequent maintenance. This thesis hypothesizes that by applying a direct current (DC) to an insulating array of posts, they will create a foul-less insulative dielectrophoretic filter (iDEP) that does not clog since particles will levitate above the insulating array.

This thesis tested an inherited …

Using An Internal Auditory Stimulus To Activate The Developing Primary Auditory Cortex: A Fetal Fmri Study, Estee Goldberg

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Insight into the rapidly developing brain in utero is scarce. Fetal functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a technique used to gain awareness into the developmental process. Previous auditory task-based fMRI studies employed an external sound stimulus directly on the maternal abdomen. However, there has since been recommendation to cease doing so. We sought to investigate a reliable paradigm to study the development of fetal brain networks and postulate that by using an internal stimulus, such as the mother singing, it would result in activation of the fetal primary auditory cortex. Volunteers carrying singleton fetuses with a gestational age of …

A Robust Lpc Filtering Method For Time-Resolved Morphology Of Eeg Activity Analysis, Jin Xu, Mark Davis, Ruairí De Fréin

Conference Papers

This paper introduces a new time-resolved spectral analysis method based on Linear Prediction Coding (LPC) method that is particularly suited to the study of the dynamics of EEG (Electroencephalogram) activity. The spectral dynamic of EEG signals can be challenging to analyse as they contain multiple frequency components and are often heavily corrupted by noise. Furthermore, the temporal and spectral resolution that can be achieved is limited by the Heisenberg-Gabor uncertainty principle [1]. The method described here is based on a z-plane analysis of the poles of the LPC which allows us to identify and estimate the frequency of the dominant …

Finite Element Simulation Of Head Impacts In Mixed Martial Arts, Stephen Tiernan, Aidan Meagher, David O'Sullivan Dr, Eoin O'Kelly Dr

Articles

This study determined brain stress and strain in an unhelmeted sport and correlated this with concussive injuries. Thirteen MMA athletes were fitted with the MiG2.0 Stanford instrumented mouthguard. The mouthguard records linear acceleration and angular velocity in 6 degrees of freedom. Angular acceleration was calculated by differentiation. All events were video recorded, time stamped and reported impacts confirmed. 298 impacts above 10g were recorded during sparring sessions and 153 impacts in competitive events. The competitive events resulted in five concussions which were diagnosed by a medical doctor. The impact with the highest angular acceleration from each sparring session and competitive …

The Impact Of Aging And Mechanical Injury On Alveolar Epithelial And Macrophage Responses In Acute Lung Injury And Inflammation, Michael S. Valentine

Theses and Dissertations

Patients with severe lung pathologies, such as Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), often require mechanical ventilation as a clinical intervention; however, this procedure frequently exacerbates the original pulmonary issue and produces an exaggerated inflammatory response that potentially leads to sepsis, multisystem organ failure, and mortality. This acute lung injury (ALI) condition has been termed Ventilator-Induced Lung Injury (VILI). Alveolar overdistension, cyclic atelectasis, and biotrauma are the primary injury mechanisms in VILI that lead to the loss of alveolar barrier integrity and pulmonary inflammation. Stress and strains during mechanical ventilation are believed to initiate alveolar epithelial mechanotransduction signaling mechanisms that contribute …

Formulation And Validation Of Nanoparticle Controlled Delivery For Chemotherapeutic Drug Products, Shani L. Levit

Theses and Dissertations

Taxol, a formulation of paclitaxel (PTX), is one of the most widely used anticancer drugs, particularly for treating recurring ovarian carcinomas following surgery. Clinically, PTX is used in combination with other drugs such as lapatinib (LAP) to increase treatment efficacy. Delivering drug combinations with nanoparticles has the potential to improve chemotherapy outcomes. In this study, we use Flash NanoPrecipitation, a rapid, scalable process to encapsulate weakly hydrophobic drugs (logP in vitro. Encapsulating either PTX or LAP into nanoparticles increases drug potency. When PTX and LAP are co-loaded in the same nanoparticle, they have a synergistic effect that is greater than …

Development Of A Torque-Based Device For The Quantification Of Arm Rigidity In Patients With Parkinson’S Disease, Georgina O. Miller

Theses and Dissertations

Parkinsonian rigidity is caused by the inability of the muscles to relax and extend properly, due to reduced dopamine levels and often begins on one side of the body before spreading contralaterally. The current standard for determining joint rigidity in a clinical setting is a test completed by the clinician based on the feel of the relaxed wrist and elbow joints as they are passively flexed and extended and a series of ordinal rating scales, the Movement Disorder Society’s – Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS), Hoehn and Yahr Scale (H&Y), and Parkinson’s Disease Questionnaire-39 (PDQ-39). These methods are used …

Development Of A Clinical Marker-Less Motion Capture System For Patient Monitoring, Abigail Eustace

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The ability to understand human movement is beneficial for deciding surgical procedures, tracking disease progression over time and helping with patient rehabilitation. The current gold-standard for collecting human movement is the use of 3-dimensional marker-based systems. Several studies have presented the many limitations to the current gold-standard that reduces the number of people who are able to benefit from a gait analysis. Those limitations in the current gold-standard include the requirements of large laboratory space, costly equipment, long instrumentation and collection time, and the potential for motion artifact from markers being placed on the skin. The purpose of this study …

The Tera Multi Terrain Mobility Aid Chassis, Colton Kemp, Daniel Nicoll, Ibrahim Suleiman, Mohammad Alyami

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The natural environment poses a significant number of obstacles and dynamic settings that makes mobility difficult for those with physical and mobility impairments. To approach this problem, a suspension was designed using inspiration from the early Mars rovers developed by NASA for traversing the varied Martian landscape. The course of the project followed the direction of a start-up through problem identification, early design generation and review, and final design production. The project outcome, through client request and proven market research, aimed to produce a multi-terrain wheelchair. The final product is a kinematic body with mobile front “legs” and a rotational …

How Degrees Of Freedom Affects Sense Of Agency, Akima Connelly, Jungsu Pak, Tian Lan, Uri Maoz

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Can the rubber-hand illusion be extended to a moving robotic arm in different degrees of freedom (DOF), inducing sense of ownership & agency over the arm? We hypothesize that DOF closer to what humans possess will result in a stronger sense of ownership and agency.

Blood Glucose Predictor, Jessica Patterson

Electrical Engineering

For my senior project, I perform data analysis using statistical methods to determine body metrics that correlate with blood glucose levels. Working with Dr. Tina Smilkstein, I take repeat measurements from 6 different volunteers to establish trends in bodily metric data. The data taken includes weight, body fat, pulse rate, VO2, blood glucose, blood pressure, hours slept, and quality of sleep. Using these values, I use the program MiniTab to view results.

A few examples of correlations with blood glucose found in this project are:

• Systolic blood pressure for females had a regression line of 124.0 -0.3366*Blood Pressure. This indicates …

Single-Cell Impedance Spectroscopy, David Paul Lange

Master's Theses

Impedance spectroscopy (IS) is an important tool for cell detection and characterization in medical and food safety applications. In this thesis, the Cal Poly Biofluidics Lab’s impedance spectroscopy system was re-evaluated and optimized for single-cell impedance spectroscopy. To evaluate the IS system, an impedance spectroscopy bioMEMS chip was fabricated in the Cal Poly Microfabcrication lab, software was developed to run IS experiments, and studies were run to validate the system. To explore IS optimization, Maxwell’s mixture theorem and the Schwartz-Christoffel transform were used to calculate an analytic impedance solution to the co-planar electrode system,a novel volume fraction to account for …

Effect Of Corrective Surgery On Lower Limb Mechanics In Patients With Crouch Gait, Adelle Milholland

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Crouch gait a progressively degrading gait deviation associated with the neurological disorder cerebral palsy. If left untreated it can lead to anterior knee pain and a loss of ambulation. At present there exists no agreed upon metric for determining the surgical procedures used to treat crouch gait and there is insufficient means to analytically compare the results of different procedures. The aims of this thesis work were to create a pipeline to transform a patient’s gait analysis data into a finite element model, develop a model of sufficient complexity to evaluate a range of outcomes by which to judge the …

Diagnostic Sequence Detection Against A Complex Background Using A Dna Molecular Computation Framework, Adan Leon Myers Y Gutierrez

Nanoscience and Microsystems ETDs

Diagnostic assays are designed to detect a unique analyte profile in a disease of interest. Nucleic acids contain an information-dense sequence, and thus are ideal candidates for unique analytes. The gold-standard of nucleic-acid-based detection is PCR which has high sensitivity, but involves time, expertise, and cost. DNA molecular logic technology holds much promise as an alternative molecular detection method due to the potential to save cost and expertise, while also achieving a high sensitivity. However, nucleic acid detection in biomedical applications carries with it the difficulty of choice of appropriate sequence and potential biological sample background.

This work describes the …

A Framework For Evaluating Cortical Architectural Anomalies In Temporal Lobe Epilepsy Patients, Hossein Rajali

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Focal cortical dysplasia (FCD) are localized regions of malformed cerebral cortex that are frequently associated with drug-resistant epilepsy. Currently, there is a lack of research towards providing quantitative methods for characterizing minor abnormalities in cortical architecture, hindering efforts to determine whether removal affects surgical outcome, and define potential imaging correlates. In our work, we have developed a tool to extract relevant features associated with cortical architectural abnormalities that can deal with artifacts including cortical layer distortions and morphological differences caused by cortical folding effects, and processing artifacts due to improper sectioning. This framework was applied to detect abnormalities across multiple …

Effects Of Three Dry Powder Inhalers On Deposition Of Aerosolized Medicine In The Human Oral-Pharyngeal-Laryngeal Regions, Mohammed Ali

Mohammed Ali

The dry powder inhaler (DPI) is a popular, effective and convenient drug delivery device for inhalation therapy to treat asthma. However, a large quantity (approximately 54%) of inhaled aerosols deposit in the oropharyngeal region. Deposition in this region is undesirable because it provides minimum therapeutic benefits and has adverse localized or systemic side effects. This study reports a method of examining electrostatic charge effects on deposition of three DPI aerosols (Spiriva^™ Handihaler, Advair Diskus^™, and Pulmicort^™ Turbohaler) in a cadaver-based cast of the human oral-pharyngeal-laryngeal (OPL) regions. Experimental aerosols were generated from the three commercially available …

Investigation Of Visual Perceptions In Parkinson's Disease And The Development Of Disease Monitoring Software, Matthew Bernardinis

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Non-motor Parkinson’s Disease (PD) symptoms are substantial factors of PD arising throughout disease stages, yet their diagnosis and monitoring remain a challenge. Sensory abnormalities in PD occur across sensory systems and disease stages, contributing to disease-related impairments. However, the extent of symptoms is unknown, with inadequate monitoring and treatment options furthering disease management difficulties. The current work studies movement-independent visual perceptions of time, displacement and velocity in PD patients across disease stages using levodopa, deep brain stimulation (DBS), or no PD therapy. Perceptual tasks were conducted using a computer-generated graphical device designed with a focus on simplicity and flexibility. Perception …

Characterization Of Nano-Cellulose Based Composites For Biomedical Applications, Mitchell P. Chesley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The number of orthopedic surgeries performed globally has steadily increased over the past decade due to the standardization of procedures as well as technological advancements. During this time orthopedic devices have been composed predominantly of metals, such as Titanium, Vanadium, Molybdenum, and Stainless steel, as well as their alloys, due to the high strength and durability of these materials. However, metals may, in fact, be suboptimal for orthopedic devices. For example, metals exhibit Young’s modulus much greater than the surrounding bone, inducing localized stress-shielding promoting cortical atrophy, which can lead to osteoporosis. In recent years polymers have been successfully explored …

Individual Variability Of Functional Connectivity In Resting-State And Naturalistic Fmri Paradigms, Mark O'Reilly

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies are criticized for their lack of control over cognitive states of individuals during observation, which may lead to increased variability in estimates of functional connectivity (FC). Engaging movies have been used in an attempt to synchronize the cognitive states of individuals during the scan, potentially reducing intersubject variability in connectivity estimates. The objective of this study was to investigate the differences in intersubject variability of FC between rest and movie conditions in a healthy cohort. The results demonstrate widespread reductions of intersubject variability of FC in the movie condition compared to the resting-state …