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Gas Embolic Factors In Cardiovascular Health, Eric L. Cutler

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Gas emboli are a clinical issue often encountered in the space exploration, marine construction, and medical fields. Individuals involved with these disciplines will often have asympomatic gas emboli circulating throughout their bodies on a regular basis. A study into the impact of chronic asymptomatic gas emboli on the risk of atherosclerosis in humans is thus presented. This research utilized a custom built cardiovascular flow simulator and accompanying data acquisition system to experimentally determine the influence of gas emboli under varied circumstances on the mean wall shear stress of a tube in-vitro. A directly inverse relationship between gas embolus presence in …