Engineering Commons^™

Modeling The Effect Of Igg Subclasses And Specificity In The Translocation Of Monoclonal Antibodies Across The Placental Barrier, Sayuri Tais Miyamoto Magnabosco

ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

Infections are responsible for over half a million neonatal deaths every year (Lawn et al., 2014). Thus, there is huge interest in leveraging maternal immunization against infectious diseases to grant fetal protection during its development through the vertical transferring of IgG antibodies, the only Ig subclass that can significantly cross the placental barrier. Studies about vertical immunization rely on in-vitro models to extrapolate physiological conditions of the human placenta. The BeWo Transwell model (Bode et al., 2006) presents itself as a reliable model to mimic the transplacental transport mechanism of antibodies (Ellinger et al., 1999; Poulsen et al., 2009) …

Flash Radiotherapy: Skin Pigmentation As A Non-Invasive Indicator For Radiation-Induced Damage, Brady Mccallister

ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

FLASH ultra-high dose rate radiotherapy (RT) is one of the most rapidly growing subfields of radiation oncology today due to its potential to increase the limits of the therapeutic ratio. The FLASH effect, which includes heightened normal tissue sparing paired with iso-effective tumor cell killing, has been literature documented, in a limited manner, in rodent models, a few large animals, and one clinical patients.

A porcine-based experiment was conducted to test the effects of FLASH RT on normal tissue compared to conventional (CONV) RT. A clinical linear accelerator (LINAC) was reversibly converted to be capable of FLASH RT. A female …

A Convolutional Neural Network For Fast Fluence Estimation In Complex Tissues, Nicholas Blasey, Geoffrey P. Luke

ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

Photoacoustic (PA) imaging is a non-invasive diagnostic imaging technique that gives images of photoabsorbers based on their absorption of optical energy. These optical absorption properties can then be linked to important tissue properties. For the method to be quantitative, however, it is necessary to have an accurate estimation of the light fluence in the tissue. The current gold standard in addressing the fluence estimation problem, a Monte Carlo Simulation, is costly in time and computation. In this work, we developed a deep neural network to quickly and accurately estimate light fluence in arbitrary tissue types and geometries. The network was …

Utilizing Neural Networks And Wearables To Quantify Hip Joint Angles And Moments During Walking And Stair Ascent, Megan V. Mccabe

ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

Wearable sensors were leveraged to develop two methods for computing hip joint angles and moments during walking and stair ascent that are more portable than the gold standard. The Insole-Standard (I-S) approach replaced force plates with force-measuring insoles and achieved results that match the curvature of results from similar studies. Peaks in I-S kinetic results are high due to error induced by applying the ground reaction force to the talus. The Wearable-ANN (W-A) approach combines wearables with artificial neural networks to compute the same results. Compared against the I-S, the W-A approach performs well (average rRMSE = 18%, R^{2 …}

Developing A Control System To Better Understand The Effects Of Pyruvate Decarboxylase Activity On Clostridium Thermocellum Metabolism, Nicholas Cervenka

ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

In order for cellulosic biofuels from Clostridium thermocellum to be commercially viable, the ethanol yield and titer of the microbe must be increased. To accomplish this, it has been suggested to introduce the Pyruvate Decarboxylase (PDC) enzyme into C. thermocellum. In order to demonstrate effects on ethanol production by PDC prior to genetic modification, a cell free system (CFS) has been developed. A purified enzyme system was developed with the CFS to function as a control. Using the purified enzyme system, PDC from Saccharomyces cerevisiae was demonstrated to be a good candidate for further testing in the CFS.

A Physical And Computational Reverse-Engineering Approach To Determine Dimensional Change And Its Relationship To Oxidation In Retrieved Orthopedic Implants, Josephine Kalshoven

ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

Oxidation of the Ultra-High Molecular Weight Polyethylene (UHMWPE) tibial inserts of total knee arthroplasty devices is a major factor underlying multiple modes of failure for these devices, including delamination, wear, and fracture. Previous research has demonstrated that oxidation of UHMWPE is driven by a high concentration of free radicals in the polyethylene. However, even new devices created with undetectable amounts of free radicals are oxidizing in vivo. One theory is that, in the absence of residual free radicals, oxidation is facilitated by absorbed species (e.g. lipids, ROS) delivered or exacerbated by contact stress. However, no method exists to comprehensively …

Spatial Frequency Domain Imaging Of Short-Wave Infrared Fluorescence For Biomedical Applications, Joseph P. Leonor

ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

Fluorescence imaging has become a standard in many clinical applications, such as tumor and vasculature imaging. One application that is becoming more prominent in cancer treatment is fluorescence-guided surgery (FGS). Currently, FGS allows surgeons the ability to visually navigate tumors and tissue structures intraoperatively. As a result, they can remove tumor more efficiently while maintaining critical structures within the patient, creating better outcomes and lower recovery times. However, background fluorescence and inability to localize depth create challenges when determining resection boundaries.

Different techniques, such as spatially modulating the illumination and imaging at longer light wavelengths, have been developed to accurately …

Impact In Practice, Maria Garman

ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

Medial Tibial Stress Syndrome (Shin splits) is an overuse injury caused by repetitive impact. If ignored it can lead to stress reactions and then stress fractures in the shins. This nagging injury is something that plagues many track athletes especially as they start to wear their competition shoes more frequently at practice to work on technical aspects of their events.

This paper investigates the relationship between ground reaction forces experienced by the athletes in each stride and what shoes they are wearing on their feet. Due to the fact that repetitive impact is a cause for shin splints, the conclusion …

Abso2luteu-Net: Tissue Oxygenation Calculation Using Photoacoustic Imaging And Convolutional Neural Networks, Kevin Hoffer-Hawlik, Geoffrey P. Luke

ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

Photoacoustic (PA) imaging uses incident light to generate ultrasound signals within tissues. Using PA imaging to accurately measure hemoglobin concentration and calculate oxygenation (sO₂) requires prior tissue knowledge and costly computational methods. However, this thesis shows that machine learning algorithms can accurately and quickly estimate sO₂. absO₂luteU-Net, a convolutional neural network, was trained on Monte Carlo simulated multispectral PA data and predicted sO₂ with higher accuracy compared to simple linear unmixing, suggesting machine learning can solve the fluence estimation problem. This project was funded by the Kaminsky Family Fund and the Neukom Institute.