Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons^™

Dynamics Of Depression Storage During Sprinkler Irrigation And Precipitation Events, Michael B. Mckinney

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Surface depression storage (D_s) is the volume of precipitation excess which is stored by surface microrelief features of soils. The volume of water stored in surface depressions when precipitation rate exceeds infiltration rate reduces the amount of runoff generated. Because Ds is dependent on soil microrelief, land slope, and crop residue, tillage and management practices can have a considerable impact on the magnitude of this value.

When modeling irrigation systems and surface hydrology, depression storage is often treated as a static abstraction, meaning that maximum storage volume must be filled before runoff occurs. However, several researchers have documented …

Evaluation Of A Novel Myoelectric Training Device, Ryan Clingman

Theses and Dissertations

While research shows that a patient’s success in using a myoelectric prosthetic arm is dependent on receiving effective training, current methods of training are not designed to effectively hold attention long enough for optimal training. This study focused on evaluating a novel myoelectric training device, consisting of a toy car controlled by EMG signals from the arm. Subjects’ performance with the trainer was evaluated to determine its ability to provide experience with EMG controls. Eight healthy adult subjects were taken through typical initial stages of myoelectric training, then asked to drive the car through a slalom course while the time, …

Life History Switch Point Plasticy In Response To Pond Drying Alyers Metamorph Allometry And Jumping Performance, Julie Charbonnier

Theses and Dissertations

Animals with complex life cycles can cope with environmental uncertainty by altering life history switch points through developmental plasticity. Pond drying is an important factor which may alter life history switch points in aquatic organisms. Many amphibians can plastically respond to changes in pond drying by emerging earlier, but few studies have examined the post-metamorphic consequences for performance. To investigate the potential carry-over effects of plasticity to pond drying, we studied the túngara frog, Physalaemus pustulosus, a tropical anuran that breeds in highly ephemeral habitats. We conducted a field study with three different water depth treatments in 60 L mesocosms …

Design, Analysis And Testing Of Haptic Feedback System For Laparoscopic Graspers In In Vivo Surgical Robots, Nikhil Salvi

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

Laparo-Endoscopic Single Site (LESS) Robotics Surgery is an advanced technology in the field of Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS). The LESS surgical robots significantly improve the surgeon’s accuracy, dexterity and visualization, and reduce the invasiveness of surgical procedure results in faster recovery time and improved cosmetic results. In a standard robotic endosurgery, the palpation of tissues is performed by laparoscopic graspers located at the end effectors. The master-slave configuration in robotic surgery leads in remote access to the operation site. Therefore, surgeon’s ability to perceive valuable sensory information is severely diminished. Sensory information such as haptics, which is essential for safe …

Integrated Analysis Of Hydrothermal Flow Through Pretreatment, Veronique Archambault-Leger, Xiongjun Shao, Lee R. Lynd

Dartmouth Scholarship

Background:

The impact of hydrothermal flowthrough (FT) pretreatment severity on pretreatment and solubilization performance metrics was evaluated for three milled feedstocks (corn stover, bagasse, and poplar) and two conversion systems (simultaneous saccharification and fermentation using yeast and fungal cellulase, and fermentation by Clostridium thermocellum).

Results:

Compared to batch pretreatment, FT pretreatment consistently resulted in higher XMG recovery, higher removal of non-carbohydrate carbon and higher glucan solubilization by simultaneous saccharification and fermentation (SSF). XMG recovery was above 90% for FT pretreatment below 4.1 severity but decreased at higher severities, particularly for bagasse. Removal of non-carbohydrate carbon during FT pretreatment increased …

Complex Geometries For Particle Image Velocimetry (Piv) Testing, Elaine T. Maestas, Ryan Wicker, David Espalin, Francisco R. Medina

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Summer 2012

Clear, physical models or phantoms are needed for particle image velocimetry (PIV) to accurately record fluid velocities within complex geometries including anatomical structures. Based on Karina Arcaute’s work on “Complex Silicon Cardiovascular Models Manufactured Using a Dip-Spin Coating Technique”, a box casting technique was developed to provide the most effective phantom for testing. The phantom is required to be free of visual obstructions, thus allowing a CCD camera to capture accurate velocity readings. In this study, complex parts were made of a water-soluble material and sanded until all ridges were removed. The model was created using a fused deposition modeling …

Characterization Of Printed Skin Equivalents, Mayela R, Aldaz Cervantes, Maria Yanez, Thomas Boland

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Summer 2012

Severe burns, ulcerations, and cuts are some of the reasons people need bioengineered skin as a treatment for full-thickness wounds. When patients run out of donor sites in their own body, using the patient’s skin as a graft is no longer an option, and tissue-engineered constructs are the only possible replacement for damaged skin. The goal of this research is to develop a hydrogel-based skin graft that will be able to function as a skin replacement in full-thickness wounds while minimizing the possibility of rejection, being cost-effective, and possessing a longer shelf-life than the grafts currently in the market. Endothelial …

Development Of A Vaccine Printer For Helicobacter Pylori, Gabriela Enriquez, Julio E. Rincon, Thomas Boland

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Summer 2012

Helicobacter pylori is present in approximately half of the world’s population, of which approximately 2% develop a type of gastric cancer. This cancer is often discovered when being in an advanced stage due to its lack of symptoms. Unfortunately, a vaccine hasn’t been successfully developed against the bacterium. Therefore, the aim of this research is to develop the functional prototype of a DNA vaccine printer. Its parts were designed in the program NX. 6.0 and built out of ABS plastic using printing technology at the University of Texas at El Paso. After being assembled, the printer will be programmed and …

Electrophoretic Screen And Functionalized Microspheres As Antigen Assays, Alejandra Hernandez, Julio Rincon, Thomas Boland

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Summer 2012

Immunoassays are used for medical diagnosis of infectious diseases. People in developing countries usually do not have access to this type of technologies, which makes infectious diseases the main cause of death in these countries. Immunoassay techniques assist the medical field with diagnosing, prognosis and monitoring of analytes present in the human body. This project will develop a portable antigen detection assay built using an electrophoretic screen with functionalized microspheres. A portable electrophoretic immunoassay will permit the reduction of lab materials and the independence of lab installations making it more accessible. This project involves two main steps: The screen modification …

Molecular Imprinting Of Silica Microspheres On Human Chorionic Gonadotropin, Paulina Almada, Julio E. Rincon, Thomas Boland

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Summer 2012

The technique of molecule imprinting prepares polymers with specific binding sites for a target molecule. Monomers are polymerized with a template present, arranging into a polymer matrix that can rebind the template once removed and creates the potential use of the polymers as artificial antibodies. The same process can be used to synthesize silica microspheres .The aim of this study was to test the ability of silica microspheres to bind human chorionic gonadotropin and be used as antibodies. 26.4 ml of tetraethoxysilane, 4.7 ml of water, 6.6 ml of 0.12 M hydrochloric acid, and 11.5 ml of 70% ethanol were …

Toward A Gpu-Accelerated Immersed Boundary Method For Wind Forecasting Over Complex Terrain, Rey Deleon, Kyle Felzien, Inanc Senocak

Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

A short-term wind power forecasting capability can be a valuable tool in the renewable energy industry to address load-balancing issues that arise from intermittent wind fields. Although numerical weather prediction models have been used to forecast winds, their applicability to micro-scale atmospheric boundary layer flows and ability to predict wind speeds at turbine hub height with a desired accuracy is not clear. To address this issue, we develop a multi-GPU parallel flow solver to forecast winds over complex terrain at the micro-scale, where computational domain size can range from meters to several kilometers. In the solver, we adopt the immersed …

Weightlifting Performance Is Related To Kinematic And Kinetic Patterns Of The Hip And Knee Joints, Kristof Kipp, Josh Redden, Michelle B. Sabick, Chad Harris

Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The purpose of this study was to investigate correlations between biomechanical outcome measures and weightlifting performance. Joint kinematics and kinetics of the hip, knee, and ankle were calculated while ten subjects performed a clean at 85% of 1-RM. Kinematic and kinetic time-series patterns were extracted with principal components analysis. Discrete scores for each time-series pattern were calculated and used to determine how each pattern was related to body-mass normalized 1-RM. Two hip kinematic and two knee kinetic patterns were significantly correlated with relative 1-RM. The kinematic patterns captured hip and trunk motions during the first pull and hip joint motion …

Tissue Engineering A Blood Vessel Mimic While Monitoring Contamination Through Sterility Assurance Testing, Navid Djassemi

Master's Theses

Tissue Engineering A Blood Vessel Mimic While Monitoring Contamination Through Sterility Assurance Testing

Navid Djassemi

Tissue engineering blood vessel mimics has been proposed as a method to analyze the endothelial cell response to intravascular devices that are used in today’s clinical settings for the treatment of cardiovascular disease. Thus, the development of in vitro blood vessel mimics (BVMs) in Cal Poly’s Tissue Engineering Lab has introduced the possibility of assessing the characteristics of cellular response to past, present, and future intravascular devices that aim at treating coronary artery disease.

This thesis aimed at improving the methods and procedures utilized in …

Kinematic And Kinetic Synergies Of The Lower Extremities During The Pull In Olympic Weightlifting, Kristof Kipp, Josh Redden, Michelle Sabick, Chad Harris

Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The purpose of this study was to identify multijoint lower extremity kinematic and kinetic synergies in weightlifting and compare these synergies between joints and across different external loads. Subjects completed sets of the clean exercise at loads equal to 65, 75, and 85% of their estimated 1-RM. Functional data analysis was used to extract principal component functions (PCF's) for hip, knee, and ankle joint angles and moments of force during the pull phase of the clean at all loads. The PCF scores were then compared between joints and across loads to determine how much of each PCF was present at …

A Large-Scale Mathematical Model Of The Rat Pulmonary Circulation And The Effect Of Chronic Hypoxia, Loolu Rafeeq

Master's Theses (2009 -)

Mathematical models are useful for developing understanding of the behavior of complex biological systems. Recent work on a “physiome” project is aimed at using computational modeling to analyze integrative biological function by developing a simulation system for hypothesis testing (Borg & Hunter, 2003). To date, extensive work on cardiovascular, endocrine and nervous system models has been undertaken. Our objective here is to contribute to this effort by further developing a comprehensive integrative model of the pulmonary circulation. A computational model of the dog pulmonary circulation was originally developed by Haworth et al. (Haworth S. T., 1996; Haworth, Linehan, Bronikowski, & …

Noninvasive Optical Quantification Of Absolute Blood Flow, Blood Oxygenation, And Oxygen Consumption Rate In Exercising Skeletal Muscle, Katelyn Gurley, Yu Shang, Guoqiang Yu

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications

This study investigates a method using novel hybrid diffuse optical spectroscopies [near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS)] to obtain continuous, noninvasive measurement of absolute blood flow (BF), blood oxygenation, and oxygen consumption rate (V̇O₂) in exercising skeletal muscle. Healthy subjects (n=9) performed a handgrip exercise to increase BF and V̇O₂ in forearm flexor muscles, while a hybrid optical probe on the skin surface directly monitored oxy-, deoxy-, and total hemoglobin concentrations ([HbO₂], [Hb], and THC), tissue oxygen saturation (S_tO₂), relative BF (rBF), and relative oxygen …

Identification Of Proper And Common Names In The Anterior Temporal Lobe: An Fmri Study, Usha Tadimeti

Master's Theses (2009 -)

Temporal lobe epilepsy is a neurological disease that affects millions of individuals worldwide. They are usually treated through surgical resection of portions of the anterior temporal lobe (ATL). Surgical resection is effective for seizure control, but produces language and verbal memory deficits such as anomic aphasia, which adversely affects an individual's quality of life. The purpose of this study was to develop a functional MRI protocol for mapping the function of ATL in healthy subjects, and to better understand the role of the ATL and other regions of the semantic system. Such a protocol may ultimately be used by surgeons …

Integration Of Eeg-Fmri In An Auditory Oddball Paradigm Using Joint Independent Component Analysis, Jain Mangalathu Arumana

Dissertations (1934 -)

The integration of event-related potential (ERP) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can contribute to characterizing neural networks with high temporal and spatial resolution. The overall objective of this dissertation is to determine the sensitivity and limitations of joint independent component analysis (jICA) within-subject for integration of ERP and fMRI data collected simultaneously in a parametric auditory oddball paradigm. The main experimental finding in this work is that jICA revealed significantly stronger and more extensive activity in brain regions associated with the auditory P300 ERP than a P300 linear regression analysis, both at the group level and within-subject. The results …

Quantitative Biomechanical Evaluation Of Upper Extremity: Strain Behavior Of The Humerus Diaphysis Under Loading, Prateek Grover

Dissertations (1934 -)

While mechanical behavior of the adult human lower extremity long bones under loading has been studied extensively, the same is not true for the adult human humerus. Mechanical data reported for cadaveric humeri and anatomic humerus models are limited to stiffness and rigidity. Strain characteristics of the humerus diaphysis as a function of loading provide a valuable addition to the currently limited knowledge. The objective of this dissertation was to accomplish this goal, using numerical/finite element (FE) methods applied to a standard anatomic humerus model (Reference-Humerus) that was developed from the NIH Visible Human Project for this purpose. Four phases …

Real-Time Virtual Pathology Using Signal Analysis And Synthesis, Dennis L. Bergin

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation discusses the modeling and simulation (M& S) research in the area of real-time virtual pathology using signal analysis and synthesis. The goal of this research is to contribute to the research in the M&S area of generating simulated outputs of medical diagnostics tools to supplement training of medical students with human patient role players.

To become clinically competent physicians, medical students must become skilled in the areas of doctor-patient communication, eliciting the patient's history, and performing the physical exam. The use of Standardized Patients (SPs), individuals trained to realistically portray patients, has become common practice. SPs provide the …