Biomedical Commons^™

Electron Beam Treatment For The Removal Of 1,4-Dioxane In Water And Wastewater, Robert Pearce, Xi Li, John Vennekate, Gianluigi Ciovati, Charles Bott

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Electron beam (e-beam) treatment uses accelerated electrons to form oxidizing and reducing radicals when applied to water without the use of external chemicals. In this study, electron beam treatment was used to degrade 1,4-dioxane in several water matrices. Removal improved in the progressively cleaner water matrices and removals as high as 94% to 99% were observed at a dose of 2.3 kGy in secondary effluent. 1,4-dioxane removal was confirmed to be primarily through hydroxyl radical oxidation. The calculated electrical energy per order was found to be 0.53, 0.26, and 0.08 kWh/m³/order for secondary effluent (Avg. total organic carbon …

Design And Evaluation Of Fabric Cooling Channels For Twisted Coiled Actuators, Alex Lizotte

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Twisted coiled actuators (TCAs) are biomimetic and inexpensive artificial muscles. To enable their integration into soft robotics, a novel cooling apparatus was designed, consisting of a fabric channel to house the TCA and a miniature air pump for forced convection. The channel was designed to be lightweight, flexible, and easy to integrate into a soft wearable robotic device. The effect that the channel dimensions had on TCA performance (cooling time, heating time, and stroke) was investigated by testing combinations of three widths (6, 8, and 10 mm) and three heights (4, 6, and 8 mm). In general, as the channel …

Small-Separation Speckle Contrast Optical Spectroscopy For Intraoperative Assessment Of Parathyroid Glands Viability During Thyroid Surgery, Connor Berger

Symposium of Student Scholars

The parathyroid glands (PTGs) are often damaged during thyroid surgeries due to a lack of methods identifying PTGs and assessing their viability. Damage to PTGs can cause hypocalcemia, a deficiency of calcium in the body. This complication can lead to detrimental consequences with economic burden. The surgeon’s current method of viability assessment is qualitative and subjective. Our technical solution is to employ an optical technique called speckle contrast optical spectroscopy (SCOS) that noninvasively quantifies the blood flow index (Db) of biological tissues at deep tissue levels (>1cm). The goal of this project is to verify SCOS at small source-detector-separation …

An Integrated Electronic-Skin Patch For Real-Time And Continuous Monitoring Of A Panel Of Biomarkers Combined With Drug Delivery, Tanzila Noushin

Electrical Engineering Theses

Inflammatory biomarkers present in the human body play a vital role in medical field by guiding the clinician in decision-making for many diseases. The levels of these inflammatory biomarkers are associated with the severity and progress of several diseases. Researchers have found that increasing severity of many diseases such as cardiovascular disease, after surgery infection, and adverse clinical outcomes due to infectious diseases, results in the elevation of the level of inflammatory biomarkers in human sweat. Furthermore, the inflammatory cytokines indicate the pathophysiology and prognosis of critically ill SARS‑CoV‑2 patients. In this thesis work, different sensors have been developed for …

Engineering 3d Bioprinted Cardiac Spheroidal Droplets With Cardiomyocytes And Cardiac Fibroblasts For Tissue Engineering And Drug Cytotoxicity Studies, Raven El Khoury

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Engineering is the supreme human endeavor that involves harnessing the scientific understanding of the natural world to design and invent objects to improve the society around us. Biomedical engineering is the implementation of concepts acquired from engineering in biology and medicine that aims to improve human health through the integration of engineering with biomedical sciences. The mission of a biomedical engineer is to develop technologies that help advance the quality of peopleâ??s health using various tools and materials with one passion and goal: making the patient's life longer and easier. Tissue engineering is developed from the field of biomaterials and …

Identifying And Minimizing Underspecification In Breast Cancer Subtyping, Jonathan Cheuk-Kiu Tang

Master's Theses

In the realm of biomedical technology, both accuracy and consistency are crucial to the development and deployment of these tools. While accuracy is easy to measure, consistency metrics are not so simple to measure, especially in the scope of biomedicine where prediction consistency can be difficult to achieve. Typically, biomedical datasets contain a significantly larger amount of features compared to the amount of samples, which goes against ordinary data mining practices. As a result, predictive models may fail to find valid pathways for prediction during training on such datasets. This concept is known as underspecification.

Underspecification has been more accepted …

Modelling And Evaluation Of Piezoelectric Actuators For Wearable Neck Rehabilitation Devices, Shaemus D. Tracey

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Neck pain is the most common neck musculoskeletal disorder, and the fourth leading cause of healthy years lost due to disability in the world. Due to the need of hands-on physical therapy and Canada’s aging population, access to treatment will become highly constrained. Wearable devices that allow at-home rehabilitation address this future limitation. However, few have emerged from the laboratory setting because they are limited by the use of conventional actuators. An overlooked type of actuation technology is that of piezoelectric actuators, more specifically, travelling wave ultrasonic motors (TWUM).

In this work, a clear procedure that outlines how the required …

The Development Of A Motion Sensing Device For Use In A Home Setting, Jaspreet K. Kalsi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second most prevalent neurodegenerative disease, with over 10 million individuals diagnosed with PD world-wide. The most common symptom characterized by PD is tremor. Tremor is an involuntary oscillatory motion that most prominently occurs in upper limb, specifically in the hand and wrist that has a measurable frequency and amplitude. This thesis aims to evaluate the usability and functionality of a tremor sensing device designed to collect quantitative data on individuals with PD. The designed device uses 23 commercially-available inertial measuring units (IMUs) located between 21 joints: distal interphalangeal (DIP) joints, proximal interphalangeal (PIP) joints, Interphalangeal …

A Rapid And Ultra-Sensitive Biosensing Platform Based On Tunable Dielectrophoresis For Robust Poc Applications, Yu Jiang

Doctoral Dissertations

With the ongoing pandemic, there have been increasing concerns recently regarding major public health issues such as abuse of organophosphorus compounds, pathogenic bacterial infections, and biosecurity in agricultural production. Biosensors have long been considered a kernel technology for next-generation diagnostic solutions to improve food safety and public health. Significant amounts of effort have been devoted to inventing novel sensing mechanisms, modifying their designs, improving their performance, and extending their application scopes. However, the reliability and selectivity of most biosensors still have much to be desired, which holds back the development and commercialization of biosensors, especially for on-site and point-of-care (POC) …

Design Of A Hemi-Anechoic Chamber For Acoustic Testing Of Hearing Devices And Development Of Custom-Designed 3d Printed Pinnae For Accurate Representation Of The Anatomical Frequency Response, Hector Hugo Estrada Medinilla

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Sound localization is the capacity to identify the general location from which a sound is originating. The primary anatomical feature responsible for the ability to localize sound is the external portion of the ear, also known as the auricle or pinna. This faculty is significantly hindered when the ear is obstructed, as is the case with hearing protection devices (HPD), which act as a barrier between sound waves and the ear canal. In the case of electronic HPDs, certain frequencies are entirely filtered out by a digital sound processor (DSP) while the remaining frequencies are delivered directly into the ear …

Fetal Electrocardiogram Detection And Analysis From Maternal Abdominal Ecg For Diagnosis Of Fetal Heart Rhythm Abnormalities, Claudia L. Angel

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Fetal cardiac arrhythmias are present in about 1–3% of pregnancies and account for about 10–20% of the referrals to fetal cardiology around the world. Most fetal arrhythmias are benign; however, some can cause fetal hydrops, preterm delivery, and higher perinatal morbidity and mortality. The evolution and treatment of fetal arrhythmia depend on a timely and complete diagnosis. However, conventional methods used in clinical practice for fetal arrhythmia diagnosis are limited since they do not reflect the primary electrophysiological conduction processes in the myocardium. Fetal electrocardiography (fECG) has the potential to better support fetal arrhythmia diagnosis through the continuous analysis of …

Development Of A Custom, 3d-Printed, Multi-Microphone, Noise-Cancelling, Hearing Protection Device With A Magnetically Attached Printed Ear Canal For Sound Localization Preservation, Brenda Leticia Valadez Mesta

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Hearing loss is a prominent health issue that affects a significant fraction of the global population. One of the main causes behind hearing loss is exposure to harmful noise levels in the workplace. There have been multiple efforts to prevent hearing loss from excessive noise in occupational settings, such as hearing conservation programs and use of hearing protection devices (HPDs), however, these are often ineffective. Although HPDs are frequently available in the workspace, they are not used as intended since they usually generate discomfort and hindered sound localization. The loss of sound localization can be hazardous in occupational settings, since …

Design And Operation Of A Microwave Flow Cytometer For Single Cell Detection And Identification, Jeffrey A. Osterberg

All Dissertations

Microwave dielectric sensing has become a popular technique in biological cell sensing for its potential in online, label-free, and real-time sensing. At microwave frequencies probing signals are sensitive to intracellular properties since they are able to penetrate cell membranes, making microwave flow cytometry a promising technology for label-free biosensing. In this dissertation a microwave flow cytometer is designed and used to measure single biological cells and micro particles. A radio frequency (RF)/microwave interferometer serves as the measurement system for its high sensitivity and tunability and we show that a two-stage interferometer can achieve up to 20 times higher sensitivity than …

Computer Aided Diagnosis System For Breast Cancer Using Deep Learning., Asma Baccouche

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The recent rise of big data technology surrounding the electronic systems and developed toolkits gave birth to new promises for Artificial Intelligence (AI). With the continuous use of data-centric systems and machines in our lives, such as social media, surveys, emails, reports, etc., there is no doubt that data has gained the center of attention by scientists and motivated them to provide more decision-making and operational support systems across multiple domains. With the recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, the use of machine learning and deep learning models have achieved remarkable advances in computer vision, ecommerce, cybersecurity, and healthcare. Particularly, numerous …

Miniaturized Battery Powered Air Quality Monitoring System, Bryan Chacon

All Theses

In this work, an air quality monitoring system was developed using various sensors that measure specific air quality parameters, including Volatile Organic Compounds, Carbon Dioxide, particulate matter of varying sizes, ambient pressure, humidity, and temperature. This system is based off a Particle micro-controller, Boron LTE CAT-M1 which allows for cellular connectivity for real-time data transmission. It is powered by a 3.7 Volt Li-Po battery and has a miniaturized design which allows for portability. This data is processed through an Internet of Things software provider that allows for the device to be connected and accessed to and from anywhere in the …

A Bulk Driven Transimpedance Cmos Amplifier For Sipm Based Detection, Shahram Hatefi Hesari

Masters Theses

The contribution of this work lies in the development of a bulk driven operational
transconducctance amplifier which can be integrated with other analog circuits and
photodetectors in the same chip for compactness, miniaturization and reducing the
power. Silicon photomultipliers, also known as SiPMs, when coupled with scintillator materials are used in many imaging applications including nuclear detection. This thesis discuss the design of a bulk-driven transimpedance amplifier suitable for detectors where the front end is a SiPM. The amplifier was design and fabricated in a standard standard CMOS process and is suitable for integration with CMOS based SiPMs and commercially …

Embedding A Grid Of Load Cells Into A Dining Table For Automatic Monitoring And Detection Of Eating Events, Mohammad Mayyan

All Dissertations

This dissertation describes a “smart dining table” that can detect and measure consumption events. This work is motivated by the growing problem of obesity, which is a global problem and an epidemic in the United States and Europe. Chapter 1 gives a background on the economic burden of obesity and its comorbidities. For the assessment of obesity, we briefly describe the classic dietary assessment tools and discuss their drawback and the necessity of using more objective, accurate, low-cost, and in-situ automatic dietary assessment tools. We explain in short various technologies used for automatic dietary assessment such as acoustic-, motion-, or …

Credit Card Fraud Detection Using Machine Learning Techniques, Nermin Samy Elhusseny, Shimaa Mohamed Ouf, Amira M. Idrees Ami

Future Computing and Informatics Journal

This is a systematic literature review to reflect the previous studies that dealt with credit card fraud detection and highlight the different machine learning techniques to deal with this problem. Credit cards are now widely utilized daily. The globe has just begun to shift toward financial inclusion, with marginalized people being introduced to the financial sector. As a result of the high volume of e-commerce, there has been a significant increase in credit card fraud. One of the most important parts of today's banking sector is fraud detection. Fraud is one of the most serious concerns in terms of monetary …

Noncontact Liquid Crystalline Broadband Optoacoustic Sensors [U.S. Patent Us11366054b2], Hengky Chandrahalim, Michael T. Dela Cruz

Faculty Publications

An optoacoustic sensor includes a liquid crystal (LC) cell formed between top and bottom plates of transparent material. A transverse grating formed across the LC cell that forms an optical transmission bandgap. A CL is aligned to form a spring-like, tunable Bragg grating that is naturally responsive to external agitations providing a spectral transition regime, or edge, in the optical transmission bandgap of the transverse grating that respond to broadband acoustic waves. The optoacoustic sensor includes a narrowband light source that is oriented to transmit light through the top plate, the LC cell, and the bottom plate. The optoacoustic sensor …

Bicep Muscle Rep Counter With Semg, Matthew Max Garcia

Electrical Engineering

The Bicep Muscle Rep Counter with SEMG is a device that was made to develop three repetition thresholds or difficulty levels from a fully-flexed bicep brachii muscle and signal to the user when consequent bicep muscle contractions pass said thresholds or levels. This device can be used when performing a bicep-focused movement or when generally flexing the bicep muscle. Essentially, this device serves to make sure each repetition of a muscle contraction passes a percentage value calculated from the electrical activity outputted from a max contraction.

The device is not designed for and does not produce data for muscle growth, …