Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons^™

A Wearable Mechatronic Device For Hand Tremor Monitoring And Suppression: Development And Evaluation, Yue Zhou

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Tremor, one of the most disabling symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD), significantly affects the quality of life of the individuals who suffer from it. These people live with difficulties with fine motor tasks, such as eating and writing, and suffer from social embarrassment. Traditional medicines are often ineffective, and surgery is highly invasive and risky. The emergence of wearable technology facilitates an externally worn mechatronic tremor suppression device as a potential alternative approach for tremor management. However, no device has been developed for the suppression of finger tremor that has been validated on a human.

It has been reported in …

The Design And Development Of A Device To Assist In Boosting Patients, Taylor A. Rieckhoff

Masters Theses

A common task a nurse is required to perform is called boosting patients. Boosting a patient is defined as lifting or sliding a patient back up in the bed after having slid down (Mannheim, Zieve, & Conaway, 2017). The current method for boosting patients involves a minimum of two personnel and an 11-step process. The 11-step process requires the person to manually lift and pull the patient using an existing half sheet on the bed (Mannheim, Zieve, & Conaway, 2017). Patients who cannot move or support themselves are moved every two to six hours or upon request (Bihn, Rieckhoff, Burkman, …

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 …

Quantitative Analysis Techniques For Assessing Organelle Organization And Dynamics In Individual Cells, Isaac Vargas

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In biomedical optics and microscopy, the organization and morphology of organelles have been widely studied. In spite of novel imaging techniques, there is still a lack of quantitative tools to easily measure cellular characteristics from image data. Previous studies have explored multiple approaches to assess organelle organization and alignment, resulting in complicated and extensive algorithms that are both subject to multiple steps of image processing and influenced by non-cellular artifacts. In this thesis, a technique called the Modified Blanket Method (MBM) is introduced to quantify organelle organization through measurements of fractal dimension (FD) on a pixel-by-pixel basis. With the use …

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 …

Fluid Shift And Fluid Resuscitation In Burn Patients With The Use Of Bio-Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy To Monitor Fluid Levels, Temitope D. Obielodan

Honors College Theses

The purpose of this research is to explore the current methods of fluid resuscitation and other possible methods of measuring the body fluid levels of burn patients in order to fully understand the fluid increase patterns in the torso area. This will be done primarily by focusing on the concept of bio-electrical impedance spectroscopy to measure the fluid levels only in the human torso area. Three similar tests were carried out by measuring the resistance values after ingesting 500ml of water. This was repeated until a total of 1500ml of water was ingested. It was found that the resistance in …

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 …

Quantifying The Outcomes Of A Virtual Reality (Vr)-Based Gamified Neck Rehabilitation, Shahan Salim

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Neck pain is a major global public health concern and adds a significant financial burden to both the healthcare system as well as people suffering from it. Additionally, it presents measurement and evaluation challenges for clinicians as well as adherence challenges and treatment barriers for the patients. We have developed a virtual reality (VR)-based video game that can be used to capture outcomes that may aid in the assessment and treatment of neck pain. We investigated: (i) performance metrics of overall accuracy, accuracy based on movement difficulty, duration, and total envelope of movement; (ii) stability across sessions; (iii) accuracy across …

Modification And Optimization Of Conducting Polymer-Modified, Redox-Magnetohydrodynamics (R-Mhd) Pumping For Enhanced And Sustained Microfluidics Applications, Md Foysal Zahid Khan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this work, a novel microfluidic pumping approach, redox-magnetohydrodynamics (R-MHD) has improved by materials and device optimization to use in lab-on-a-chip applications. In R-MHD, magnetic flux (B) and ionic current density (j) interacts to generate body force (FB) in between active electrodes, according to the equation FB = j×B. This unique fluid pumping approach is scalable, tunable, generates flat flow profile, and does not require any channels or valves. Pumping performance, such as speed scales with the ionic current density (j) and duration depends on the total charge (Q). The ionic current density (j) results from the conversion of electronic …

Development Of A Statistical Shape-Function Model Of The Implanted Knee For Real-Time Prediction Of Joint Mechanics, Kalin Gibbons

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Outcomes of total knee arthroplasty (TKA) are dependent on surgical technique, patient variability, and implant design. Non-optimal design or alignment choices may result in undesirable contact mechanics and joint kinematics, including poor joint alignment, instability, and reduced range of motion. Implant design and surgical alignment are modifiable factors with potential to improve patient outcomes, and there is a need for robust implant designs that can accommodate patient variability. Our objective was to develop a statistical shape-function model (SFM) of a posterior stabilized implant knee to instantaneously predict output mechanics in an efficient manner. Finite element methods were combined with Latin …

Impedance-Based Microfluidic Platform For Quantitative Biology, Amin Mansoorifar

Mechanical Engineering Research Theses and Dissertations

Dielectric properties of biological cells are functions of cellular structure, content, state, and phenotype. Dielectric spectroscopy (DS) is a nondestructive method to characterize dielectric properties by measuring impedance data over a frequency range. This method has been widely used for various applications such as counting, sizing, and monitoring biological cells and particles. Recently, this method has been suggested to be utilized in various stages of the drug discovery process due to its low sample consumption and fast analysis time.

In this thesis, we have developed a lab-on-a-chip device that uses an electro-activated microwells array for capturing, making DS measurements on, …

Remote Navigation And Contact-Force Control Of Radiofrequency Ablation Catheters, Daniel Gelman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Atrial fibrillation (AF), the most common and clinically significant heart rhythm disorder, is characterized by rapid and irregular electrical activity in the upper chambers resulting in abnormal contractions. Radiofrequency (RF) cardiac catheter ablation is a minimally invasive curative treatment that aims to electrically correct signal pathways inside the atria to restore normal sinus rhythm. Successful catheter ablation requires the complete and permanent elimination of arrhythmogenic signals by delivering transmural RF ablation lesions contiguously near and around key cardiac structures. These procedures are complex and technically challenging and, even when performed by the most skilled physician, nearly half of patients undergo …

Neurostimulator With Waveforms Inspired By Nature For Wearable Electro-Acupuncture, Jose Aquiles Parodi Amaya

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The work presented here has 3 goals: establish the need for novel neurostimulation waveform solutions through a literature review, develop a neurostimulation pulse generator, and verify the operation of the device for neurostimulation applications.

The literature review discusses the importance of stimulation waveforms on the outcomes of neurostimulation, and proposes new directions for neurostimulation research that would help in improving the reproducibility and comparability between studies.

The pulse generator circuit is then described that generates signals inspired by the shape of excitatory or inhibitory post-synaptic potentials (EPSP, IPSP). The circuit analytical equations are presented, and the effects of the circuit …

Transmission Probability Of Embolic Debris Through The Aortic Arch And Daughter Vessels During A Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement Procedure, Jessica Lena Wirth

Master's Theses

Cerebral ischemia leading to an ischemic stroke is a possible complication of a transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) procedure. This is because embolic debris can become dislodged and travel through the aortic arch, where they either continue to the descending aorta and join the systemic circulation or travel into the cerebral vasculature through the three daughter vessels that branch off the top of the aortic arch. These three vessels are the brachiocephalic artery, the left subclavian artery, and the left common carotid artery. These three vessels lead either directly or indirectly to the cerebral vasculature, where the diameter of vessels …

Cej Ankle Support Report, Christine Prothe, James Baldwin, Erik Espinoza

Biomedical Engineering

This document provides information about an ankle support device designed to allow for ankle dorsiflexion and plantar flexion. In this document the product’s specifications, objectives and expectations are outlined. Included in this document is background information, stage gate process, prototype design development and considerations, and qualification requirements.

House Calls Mobile Virtual Stethoscope, Abigail Lindquist, Abigael Donohue, Trey Nahhas

Biomedical Engineering

The purpose of this scope of work is to outline the progress of the Virtual Stethoscope design and development project as sponsored by House Calls Mobile. This device looks to provide accessible at-home care for patients all over the country through the mobile phone stethoscope attachment. With the virtual stethoscope technology, patients will be able to perform high-quality, in-home observation of heart, stomach, and lung sounds to be transmitted to a physician in real time. Eliminating the need to travel to a doctor’s office encourages patients to perform more regular checkups, increasing their likelihood potentially of life-saving early diagnoses. This …

Sand Foot: A Prosthesis For Walking On Sand, Samantha A. Galicinao, John Dewing, Daniel Dugan Dotson, Christopher Urasaki

Biomedical Engineering

This critical design report describes the product development of a prosthesis for use on sand. Quality of Life Plus (QL+), a national non-profit organization aimed to develop prostheses for veterans and people with disabilities, introduced this project and its accompanying challenger, Sgt. Brady, to Cal Poly’s Interdisciplinary Senior Project class in September 2018. After consulting with Sgt. Brady and QL+ and performing extensive research, the Sand Foot team defined customer requirements and engineering specifications to meet these requirements. Comfortability, durability, and sandproof were key customer requirements. Several conceptual models were brainstormed and a final design was selected based on the …

Cooking Hand Multi-Tool, Amanda D. Meares, Amy H. Wilson, Ethan G. Littlejohn, Duania A. Evans

Biomedical Engineering

The purpose of this project was to devise a solution for Jorge Segura, a US Marine who was wounded in Afghanistan and had to have his non-dominant arm amputated above the elbow. His current prosthetic attachments are not suited to cooking tasks, so he needed a way to cook more effectively with either prosthetic attachments or accessibility devices. The main tasks that he needed help with was holding down food on cutting boards and stabilizing pots, pans, and bowls especially when stirring. After background research, exploring commercially available devices, and talking with our challenger, our solution was to design three …

Applying An Innovative Idea To Kidney Stone Removal, Jack Beaty

Honors Theses

Renal lithiasis, commonly referred to as “kidney stones” is a condition in which the urine composition crystallizes and cannot pass through the ureter, causing pain and discomfort. Renal lithiasis can be caused by diet, infection, reduced water retention, or hereditary disorders; each of which results in a distinct stone composition [1]. Stone compositions can vary between calcium oxalate, struvite, uric acid, and cystine[2]. Each stone type, however, provides the same pain to the patient and the same potential risk of blocking the urinary system.

Kidney stone symptoms may include but are not limited to: pain in the lower back, the …

The Theia Soteria: Alternative Design For Safer Initial Entry During Laparoscopic Procedures, Kayla Dubois, Patrick Ryan, Madelyn Joanis

Honors Theses

Laparoscopic procedures account for 15 million surgeries worldwide [1], with the initial entry into the peritoneal cavity accounting for 33-50% of all major laparoscopic complications [7]. This initial entry is the most dangerous as surgeons must enter the cavity using a sharp object with no visibility and space between the outer surface of the cavity and internal tissues. During the initial entry into the peritoneal cavity, the patients undergoing laparoscopic procedures are at a high risk for damage to internal organs and vasculature, necessitating the development of a device to protect these internal tissues and increase patient safety.

A 3-Dimensional In Silico Test Bed For Radiofrequency Ablation Catheter Design Evaluation And Optimization, Carolyn Teng

Master's Theses

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the disordered activation of the atrial myocardium, which is a major cause of stroke. Currently, the most effective, minimally traumatic treatment for AF is percutaneous catheter ablation to isolate arrhythmogenic areas from the rest of the atrium. The standard in vitro evaluation of ablation catheters through lesion studies is a resource intensive effort due to tissue variability and visual measurement methods, necessitating large sample sizes and multiple prototype builds. A computational test bed for ablation catheter evaluation was built in SolidWorks® using the morphology and dimensions of the left atrium adjacent structures. From this geometry, the …

Evaluation Of Individual Finger Forces During Activities Of Daily Living In Healthy Individuals And Those With Hand Arthritis, Michael Riddle

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Hand-Osteoarthritis (H-OA) leads to pain, loss of grip strength, and decreased hand function. Current treatment for H-OA involves joint protection programs (JPP) which seek to reduce joint loading during activity. The use of wearable technology to measure hand forces during activity has the potential to determine the effectiveness of JPP. The objective of this thesis was to develop and validate a method of directly measuring finger forces during the performance of activities of daily living, and then use that system to measure the envelope of hand forces during activity in healthy individuals and in patients with H-OA. A commercially-available capacitive …

Developing An Optomechanical Approach For Characterizing Mechanical Properties Of Single Adherent Cells, Ali Mehrnezhad

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Mechanical properties of a cell reflect its biological and pathological conditions including cellular disorders and fundamental cellular processes such as cell division and differentiation. There have been active research efforts to develop high-throughput platforms to mechanically characterize single cells. Yet, many of these research efforts are focused on suspended cells and use a flow-through configuration. Therefore, adherent cells are detached prior to the characterization, which seriously perturbs the cellular conditions. Also, methods for adherent cells are limited in their throughput.

My study is aimed to fill the technical gap in the field of single cell analysis, which is a high-throughput …

A Bioinstrumentation Active Learning Educational Module: The Design Of A Working Temperature Sensor Using A Ntc Thermistor, Baylor Bush

Biomedical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Arkansas has continued to develop over the years, with more students enrolling in the program each year. Within the first biomedical engineering course, Introduction to Biomedical Engineering, various topics are introduced to students, and the topic of bioinstrumentation has been one of the most complex and difficult topics for students to comprehend through just a few lectures. In order to aid students in grasping these intricate concepts, an active learning module was developed in which students can work in groups to build a simple thermistor circuit as a temperature sensor. The …

The Effects Of Bone Morphogenic Protein 2 On The Viability And Proliferation Of Dental Pulp Stem Cell Isolates, Joseph Cinelli

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Growth factor is an umbrella term used to describe a signaling molecule present in organisms that serves the purpose of influencing a stimulatory or inhibitory response from the target cell it acts on. Growth factors are categorized and classified by the types of tissues they act on and the cellular responses they illicit. For example, there are growth factors that act primarily in connective tissue on fibroblasts and they are aptly classified as the fibroblast growth factor family. Similarly, there is another family of growth factors that act on bone forming cells, among others, and they are known as bone …

The Affective Perceptual Model: Enhancing Communication Quality For Persons With Pimd, Jadin Tredup

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Methods for prolonged compassionate care for persons with Profound Intellectual and Multiple Disabilities (PIMD) require a rotating cast of import people in the subjects life in order to facilitate interaction with the external environment. As subjects continue to age, dependency on these people increases with complexity of communications while the quality of communication decreases. It is theorized that a machine learning (ML) system could replicate the attuning process and replace these people to promote independence. This thesis extends this idea to develop a conceptual and formal model and system prototype.

The main contributions of this thesis are: (1) proposal of …

Using Peripheral Venous Pressure Waveforms To Predict Key Hemodynamic Parameters, Ali Zohair A Alalawi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Analysis of peripheral venous pressure (PVP) waveforms is a novel method of monitoring intravascular volume. Two cohorts were used to study the hemodynamics change of the body state and its influence on the PVP using (1) dehydration setting with infants suffering from pyloric stenosis and (2) hemorrhage setting during a craniosynostosis elective surgery. The goal of this research is to develop a minimally invasive method of analyzing the PVP waveforms and find correlations with volume loss.

Twenty-three pyloric stenosis patients PVP were acquired at five stages and were divided into euvolemic, normal fluid volume, and hypovolemic, significant fluid loss. Seven …

Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy To Quantify In Vivo Tissue Optical Properties: Applications In Human Epithelium And Subcutaneous Murine Colon Cancer, Gage Joseph Greening

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Colorectal cancer is the 4th most common and 2nd deadliest cancer. Problems exist with predicting which patients will respond best to certain therapy regimens. Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy has been suggested as a candidate to optically monitor a patient’s early response to therapy and has been received favorably in experimentally managing other cancers such as breast and skin. In this dissertation, two diffuse reflectance spectroscopy probes were designed: one with a combined high-resolution microendoscopy modality, and one that was optimized for acquiring data from subcutaneous murine tumors. For both probes, percent errors for estimating tissue optical properties (reduced scattering coefficient and …

Vector Flow Imaging In Pediatric Cardiology - Extracting And Validating Data, Mason Belue

Biomedical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

In the field of bedside cardiac diagnostic imaging, Doppler Ultrasound (DU) is the gold standard for diagnosing heart conditions. The largest benefit of DU is its ability to noninvasively image cardiac flow and allow the estimation of blood velocity and quantification of anatomical disease. However, to get correct velocity estimation, the position of the transducer in relation to the flow field needs to be known. This is the problem of angle/direction dependency and limits DUs accuracy when imaging in areas where perfect alignment or exact position of the transducer in relation to flow field is not possible or known, such …