Biomedical Commons^™

A Voice Activated Prosthetic Mode Of Control, Will Picken

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

There are many options for a prosthetic mode of control. The most commonly created modes of control involve surface EMG (sEMG) and require that the user have well defined muscle activation in order to trigger the movement of the prosthetic. Unfortunately, many prosthetic users do not have the required muscle tone or strength to trigger these sensors, so the need for a control mechanism that doesn’t rely on sEMG is clear. This study focuses on the development of a low-cost, voice activated prosthetic mode of control compatible with the prosthetics developed by Dr. Zuniga and his research team.

The printed …

A Radio Frequency Identification (Rfid) Prosthetic Control System, Andrew Butler

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Item classification and tagging in embedded systems has become ubiquitous in our society due to radio frequency identification (RFID) and the cost has dropped significantly for hardware that can interact with these devices. Due to this, possibilities in the realm of prosthetic control systems opens up for dynamic grip selection without user intervention. This study focuses on the development of a device capable of this functionality that is compatible with the prosthetics designed by Dr. Zuniga and his research team.

The printed circuit board (PCB) was designed using the EAGLE EDA package and incorporates a lithium polymer battery with a …

Development Of A Myoelectric Detection Circuit Platform For Computer Interface Applications, Nickolas Andrew Butler

Master's Theses

Personal computers and portable electronics continue to rapidly advance and integrate into our lives as tools that facilitate efficient communication and interaction with the outside world. Now with a multitude of different devices available, personal computers are accessible to a wider audience than ever before. To continue to expand and reach new users, novel user interface technologies have been developed, such as touch input and gyroscopic motion, in which enhanced control fidelity can be achieved. For users with limited-to-no use of their hands, or for those who seek additional means to intuitively use and command a computer, novel sensory systems …

A Pulse Sensor Interface Design For Fpga Based Multisensor Health Monitoring Platform, Yu Wang, Sunghoon Jang

Publications and Research

The FPGA-based platform is critical for producing an inexpensive early validation platform design. In past years, sensor nodes based on the FPGA platform have been proposed to be IoT low-end devices. In this study, we present the FPGA based IoT low-end reconfigurable pulse sensor interface design that can be integrated with a multi-sensor healthcare platform to monitor a human pulse vital sign and be able to distinguish between user normal, Bradycardia, or Tachycardia heart rate. The pulse sensor interface is implemented by VHDL programming and FPGA technology. The designed pulse sensor peripheral interface is reliable and reconfigurable. It can collect …

Design And Optimization Of An Ionizing-Radiation-Free Dental Imaging Scheme By Near Infrared Fluorescence, Thomas Hartzler

LSU Master's Theses

There is a global need for access to oral health care. Proper oral health care is necessary for physiological and psychological health, as well as social and economic issues. Major oral diseases that must be screened include caries, cracked teeth, and impacted molars. These diseases are screened and diagnosed using a variety of medical imaging methods, computed tomography (CT) X-ray being the most popular and efficient method. The challenges in screening with X-ray technology include financial and time cost as well as health risk, including radiation exposure induced cancer (REIC). This thesis summarizes research to explore the possibility of overcoming …

Telemedicine: An Iot Application For Healthcare Systems, Mohammad Abdellatif, Walaa Mohamed

Electrical Engineering

Telemedicine is the abstract term used to define medical services delivered through Information Technology and Telecommunications. With the growing advancements in the field of data mining, pattern recognition, expert systems, and image processing, the motivation of such a technology has increased. This allowed Telemedicine to be a stable solution especially because people are starting to trust the system more for its higher accuracy. This paper proposes a Telemedicine platform between the patient and the doctor. This platform belongs to the internet of medical things (IoMT) by enabling multiple medical sensors to connect to a server either using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or …

Mechanisms And Immunogenicity Of Nspef-Induced Cell Death In B16f10 Melanoma Tumors, Alessandra Rossi, Olga N. Pakhomova, Andrei G. Pakhomov, Samantha Weygandt, Anna A. Bulysheva, Len E. Murray, Peter A. Mollica, Claudia Muratori

Bioelectrics Publications

Accumulating data indicates that some cancer treatments can restore anticancer immunosurveillance through the induction of tumor immunogenic cell death (ICD). Nanosecond pulsed electric fields (nsPEF) have been shown to efficiently ablate melanoma tumors. In this study we investigated the mechanisms and immunogenicity of nsPEF-induced cell death in B16F10 melanoma tumors. Our data show that in vitro nsPEF (20-200, 200-ns pulses, 7 kV/cm, 2 Hz) caused a rapid dose-dependent cell death which was not accompanied by caspase activation or PARP cleavage. The lack of nsPEF-induced apoptosis was confirmed in vivo in B16F10 tumors. NsPEF also failed to trigger ICD-linked responses such …

Quantifying The Concentration And Penetration Depth Of Long-Lived Rons In Plasma Activated Water By Uv Absorption Spectroscopy, Zhijie Liu, Chunxi Zhou, Dingxin Liu, Tongtong He, Li Guo, Dehui Xu, Michael G. Kong

Bioelectrics Publications

Reactive oxygen and reactive nitrogen species (RONS) are believed to play a key role in biomedical applications, which means that RONS must reach the target tissue to produce a therapeutic effect. Existing methods (electron spin spectrometry and microplate reading) to determine the RONS concentration are not suitable for experimental real-time measurements because they require adding an indicating reagent to the plasma-treated medium, which may alter the chemical composition of the medium. In this paper, we propose a method to measure the long-lived RONS concentration in plasma-activated water (PAW) by using UV absorption spectroscopy. Based on an analysis and fit of …

Nanosecond Pulsed Electric Fields Induce Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress Accompanied By Immunogenic Cell Death In Murine Models Of Lymphoma And Colorectal Cancer, Alessandra Rossi, Olga N. Pakhomova, Peter A. Mollica, Maura Casciola, Uma Mangalanathan, Andrei G. Pakhomov, Claudia Muratori

Bioelectrics Publications

Depending on the initiating stimulus, cancer cell death can be immunogenic or non-immunogenic. Inducers of immunogenic cell death (ICD) rely on endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress for the trafficking of danger signals such as calreticulin (CRT) and ATP. We found that nanosecond pulsed electric fields (nsPEF), an emerging new modality for tumor ablation, cause the activation of the ER-resident stress sensor PERK in both CT-26 colon carcinoma and EL-4 lymphoma cells. PERK activation correlates with sustained CRT exposure on the cell plasma membrane and apoptosis induction in both nsPEF-treated cell lines. Our results show that, in CT-26 cells, the activity of …

Synthesis, Characterization And Antibacterial Properties Of Silver(I) N-(4-Pyridyl) Benzamide Complexes With Varying Conterions, Mauro J. Ruiz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Organic semiconductor materials composed of - stacking aromatic compounds have been under intense investigation for their potential uses in flexible electronics and other advanced technologies. Herein we report a new family of seven - stacking compounds of Silver(I) N-(4-pyridyl) Benzamide with varying counterions, namely [Ag(NPBA)2]X, where NPBA is N-(4-pyridyl) Benzamine, X = NO3- (1), ClO4- (2), CF3SO3- (3), PF6- (4), BF4- (5), CH3PhSO3- (6), and PhSO3- (7), which form extended - stacking networks in one-dimensional (1D), 2D and 3D directions in the crystalline solid-state via the phenyl moiety, with average inter-ring distances of 3.823 Å. Interestingly, the counterions that contain …

Effectiveness Of Physiological Alarm Management Strategies To Prevent Alarm Fatigue, Amy Clemens

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

There is limited clinical research on the effectiveness of alarm management strategies and nursing behaviors related to alarms in clinical settings. As many as 76% of physiological monitor alarms are overlooked as clinically insignificant by nursing staff. Excessive alarms may impact patient outcomes and cause cognitive overload for nurses that can result in medical errors and missed patient resuscitations. The purpose of this systematic review was to rate alarm management studies on level of evidence for interventions, nursing responses to alarms, and impact on alarm fatigue behavior. The nursing role effectiveness model guided this project. Twenty-seven studies were reviewed to …

Novel Applications Of Machine Learning In Bioinformatics, Yi Zhang

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Technological advances in next-generation sequencing and biomedical imaging have led to a rapid increase in biomedical data dimension and acquisition rate, which is challenging the conventional data analysis strategies. Modern machine learning techniques promise to leverage large data sets for finding hidden patterns within them, and for making accurate predictions. This dissertation aims to design novel machine learning-based models to transform biomedical big data into valuable biological insights. The research presented in this dissertation focuses on three bioinformatics domains: splice junction classification, gene regulatory network reconstruction, and lesion detection in mammograms.

A critical step in defining gene structures and mRNA …

Relation Prediction Over Biomedical Knowledge Bases For Drug Repositioning, Mehmet Bakal

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Identifying new potential treatment options for medical conditions that cause human disease burden is a central task of biomedical research. Since all candidate drugs cannot be tested with animal and clinical trials, in vitro approaches are first attempted to identify promising candidates. Likewise, identifying other essential relations (e.g., causation, prevention) between biomedical entities is also critical to understand biomedical processes. Hence, it is crucial to develop automated relation prediction systems that can yield plausible biomedical relations to expedite the discovery process. In this dissertation, we demonstrate three approaches to predict treatment relations between biomedical entities for the drug repositioning task …

1995-2005: A Decade Of Innovation In Low Temperature Plasma And Its Applications, Mounir Laroussi

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Scientific breakthroughs tend to come in spurts when unique societal, economical, and political circumstances conspire (knowingly or unknowingly) and create an environment ripe for creativity. The field of low temperature plasma (LTP) recently experienced such an upheaval, which this paper attempts to relate in some details. There have been “roadmap” papers published before, which look towards the future of the field, but all roads start somewhere and even “new” roads are often paved over older roads that were discovered and traveled by early pioneers. With the sharp decrease in funding for fusion research in the USA in the early 1990s …

Image Analysis For Lung Cancer Diagnosis And Superresolution Localization Microscopy, Xia Huang

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

With the development of imaging analysis techniques, flurry of applications associated with it has been hatched. In this paper, image analysis on both organ and cellular levels will be demonstrated. For organ level images, a deep learning based computer aided lung cancer diagnosis based on computer tomography images is studied. Deep learning techniques have been extensively used in computerized pulmonary nodule analysis recent years. Many reported studies still utilized hybrid methods for diagnosis, in which convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are used only as one part of the pipeline, and the whole system still needs either traditional image processing modules or …

Bioprinted Mcf7 Breast Cancer Cells, An In Vitro Model For Drug Discovery, Aleli Campbell

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Current breast cancer treatments are successful in eradicating this disease in the majority of patients, though there are quite a few cases where relapse or recurrence follow, which may lead to continued cancer therapy or death. Thermal inkjet bioprinting (BP) is a novel technique that is used to bioprint biomaterials or diverse cellular organisms to engineer tissue or organ models in vitro. In this Dissertation, we investigated the molecular effect of BP MCF7 breast cancer cells (BCC), cell survival of the cells when exposed to FDA approved systemic therapy alone and in combination with radiation and lastly, the ability of …

Platelet Biology And Thrombosis: Juul E-Cigarette Exposure And 5ht2a Receptor Drug Discovery, Jean Emmanuel Montes Ramirez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

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Segmentation And Registration Based Automatic Cancer Proton Treatment Analysis, Yang Zhang

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Due to its low side effects, proton therapy is rapidly developing around the world. However, the time and labor it takes to deliver the treatment have prevented widespread use in the clinic setting. For this reason, an automatic proton treatment analysis system is needed to improve efficiency during the treatment process.

The challenge lies in improving the accuracy and speed of the current proton treatment analysis system. The Range shifter correction factor is considered the same value under any given condition in our treatment system. This approximate algorithm limits the accuracy of the proton treatment analysis system. In addition, medical …

Computer-Aided Classification Of Impulse Oscillometric Measures Of Respiratory Small Airways Function In Children, Nancy Selene Avila

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Computer-aided classification of respiratory small airways dysfunction is not an easy task. There is a need to develop more robust classifiers, specifically for children as the classification studies performed to date have the following limitations: 1) they include features derived from tests that are not suitable for children and 2) they cannot distinguish between mild and severe small airway dysfunction.

This Dissertation describes the classification algorithms with high discriminative capacity to distinguish different levels of respiratory small airways function in children (Asthma, Small Airways Impairment, Possible Small Airways Impairment, and Normal lung function). This ability came from innovative feature selection, …

Raman Computational And Experimental Studies On Label-Free Biological Investigations, John Ciubuc

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Raman spectroscopy is an optical technique that allows for label-free biological investigations to take place. This approach presents both new perspectives and a means for visualizing investigations. This thesis confronts two biological cases: dopamine (DA) detection at physiological levels and assessment of renal osteodystrophy (ROD). We employed surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy on silver nanoparticles recording DA concentrations as low as 10−11 molar. Quantum chemical density functional calculations were carried out using Gaussian-09 analytical suite software. Good agreement between the simulated and experimentally determined results indicates the existence of distinct DA molecular forms, such as uncharged DA±, anionic DA−, and dopaminequinone. Disappearance …