Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons^™

Generation, Analysis, And Evaluation Of Patient-Specific, Osteoligamentous, Spine Meshes, Austin R. Tapp

Biomedical Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Scoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine, is traditionally corrected with bracing treatments or by a highly invasive posterior spinal fusion (PSF) operation. These correction strategies are constrained by current imaging modalities, which fail to elucidate the soft tissue anatomy that is known to play a critical role in spinal stiffness and overall structure. Osteoligamentous segmentations of the spinal column offer a foundation for downstream finite element (FE) studies seeking to optimize bracing treatments or determine ideal surgical approaches.

This thesis presents methods for automatically and semi-automatically segmenting vertebrae and surrounding soft tissues of the spinal column using X-ray computed …

Ablation Of Cardiac Tissue With Nanosecond Pulsed Electric Fields: Experiments And Numerical Simulations, Fei Xie

Biomedical Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Cardiac ablation for the treatment of cardiac arrhythmia is usually performed by heating tissue with radio-frequency (RF) electrical currents to create conduction-blocking lesions in order to stop the propagation of electrical waves. Problems associated with RF ablation are recurrence of arrhythmias after successful treatments, tissue loss beyond the targeted tissue, long duration of the ablation procedure, and thermal side effects including thrombus formation that may lead to stroke. Here, we propose a new, non-thermal ablation method using nanosecond pulsed electric fields (nsPEFs) with better-controlled ablation volume, shorter procedure time, and no thermal side effects. We demonstrate that we can create …