Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons^™

Fabrication And Evaluation Of A Collagen-Based Fiber-Gel Three-Dimensional Construct For Peripheral Nerve Repair, Mevan Lakmal Siriwardane

Dissertations

Nerve regeneration following a peripheral nerve injury often relies on growth cone- mediated guidance and the presence of Schwann cells to support the regenerating axons and remyelinate portions of denervated nerve pathways. The emphasis of this work is to develop a synthetic nervous tissue construct that contains similar basal lamina or extracellular matrix to peripheral nerve in order to achieve a level of effectiveness in nerve repair and future peripheral nerve regeneration applications. To this end, three- dimensional nervous tissue constructs consisting of type I collagen are fabricated into a composite biomaterial scaffold to promote contact-guided growth of neuronal and …

Quantification Of Neural Substrates Of Vergence System Via Fmri, Yelda Alkan

Dissertations

Vergence eye movement is one of the oculomotor systems which allow depth perception via disconjugate movement of the eyes. Neuroimaging methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measure neural activity changes activity in the brain while subjects perform experimental tasks. A rich body of primate investigations on vergence is already established in the neurophysiology literature; on the other hand, there are a limited number of fMRI studies on neural mechanisms behind the vergence system.

The results demonstrated that vergence system shares neural sources and also shows differentiation within the boundaries of frontal eye fields (FEF) and midbrain of the …