Engineering Commons^™

Investigation Of A New Material For Heart Valve Tissue Engineering, Claire Brougham, Nian Shen, Allison Cudsworth, Thomas Flanagan, Stefan Jockenhoevel, Fergal O'Brien

Conference Papers

No abstract provided.

Altering Iron Oxide Nanoparticle Surface Properties Induce Cortical Neuron Cytotoxicity, Christopher J. Rivet, Yuan Yuan, Diana Andra Borca-Tasciuc, Ryan J. Gilbert

Chemical and Biochemical Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles, with diameters in the range of a few tens of nanometers, display the ability to cross the blood-brain barrier and are envisioned as diagnostic and therapeutic tools in neuro-medicine. However, despite the numerous applications being explored, insufficient information is available on their potential toxic effect on neurons. While iron oxide has been shown to pose a decreased risk of toxicity, surface functionalization, often employed for targeted delivery, can significantly alter the biological response. This aspect is addressed in the present study, which investigates the response of primary cortical neurons to iron oxide nanoparticles with coatings frequently …

Gpu-Accelerated Large-Eddy Simulation Of Turbulent Channel Flows, Rey Deleon, Inanc Senocak

Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

High performance computing clusters that are augmented with cost and power efficient graphics processing unit (GPU) provide new opportunities to broaden the use of large-eddy simulation technique to study high Reynolds number turbulent flows in fluids engineering applications. In this paper, we extend our earlier work on multi-GPU acceleration of an incompressible Navier-Stokes solver to include a large-eddy simulation (LES) capability. In particular, we implement the Lagrangian dynamic subgrid scale model and compare our results against existing direct numerical simulation (DNS) data of a turbulent channel flow at Re_τ = 180. Overall, our LES results match fairly well with …

An Open-Source Sandbox For Increasing The Accessibility Of Functional Programming To The Bioinformatics And Scientific Communities, Matthew Fenwick, Colbert Sesanker, Jay Vyas, Michael R. Gryk

UCHC Articles - Research

Scientists are continually faced with the need to express complex mathematical notions in code. The renaissance of functional languages such as LISP and Haskell is often credited to their ability to implement complex data operations and mathematical constructs in an expressive and natural idiom. The slow adoption of functional computing in the scientific community does not, however, reflect the congeniality of these fields. Unfortunately, the learning curve for adoption of functional programming techniques is steeper than that for more traditional languages in the scientific community, such as Python and Java, and this is partially due to the relative sparseness of …

Conference Program, David Elad

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in Medicine And Biology in Conjunction With the Seventh International Biofluid Mechanics Symposium

No abstract provided.

7d Cardiac Flow Mri: Techniques & Automation Of Reconstruction, Michael G. Ambrosia

ETD Archive

Advances in magnetic resonance imaging to quantify the blood flow in the heart and major vessels stemming from the heart has recently allowed for advanced clinical applications for patients suffering from cardiac valve problems and aortic abnormalities. 7D cardiac flow quantification is relatively new, but has already shown potential in several clinical applications, including bicuspid valve and aortic coarctation characterization. In addition radiologists diagnosing valvular regurgitation may benefit from insight provided by the 7D cardiac flow quantification protocol. 7D cardiac flow quantification using magnetic resonance imaging will provide direction flow quantification in the anterior / posterior, head / foot, and …

Controlled Delivery Of Tgf-Ss1 From Plga Nanoparticles, Pratik K. Vaidya

ETD Archive

Abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs) typically manifest as localized wall weakening and dilation of the infrarenal aorta, which grows gradually, and ultimately leads to fatal rupture. It is caused due to overexpression of proteolytic enzymes (matrix metalloproteases or MMPs) resulting into disruption of tissue structure, especially elastic matrix, which cannot be regenerated by adult vascular cells. On account of post-operative complications associated with their surgical repair, there is a critical need for developing non-surgical strategies for slowing and even regressing AAA growth. Recent studies in our laboratory have demonstrated that 1 ng/mL of transforming growth factor-β1 (TGF-β1) enhances regenerative repair by …

Elastogenic Characterization Of Rat Bm-Msc-Derived Smcs Towards Use In Soft Tissue Engineering, Sahithya Wintrich

ETD Archive

No abstract provided.

Mineralization Potential Of Electrospun Pdo-Hydroxyapatite-Fibrinogen Blended Scaffolds, Isaac Rodriguez, Parthasarathy A. Madurantakam, Jennifer M. Mccool, Scott A. Sell, Hu Yang, Peter C. Moon, Gary L. Bowlin

Biomedical Engineering Publications

The current bone autograft procedure for cleft palate repair presents several disadvantages such as limited availability, additional invasive surgery, and donor site morbidity. The present preliminary study evaluates the mineralization potential of electrospun polydioxanone:nano-hydroxyapatite : fibrinogen (PDO : nHA : Fg) blended scaffolds in different simulated body fluids (SBF). Scaffolds were fabricated by blending PDO : nHA : Fg in the following percent by weight ratios: 100 : 0 : 0, 50 : 25 : 25, 50 : 50 : 0, 50 : 0 : 50, 0 : 0 : 100, and 0 : 50 : 50. Samples were immersed …

A Preliminary Study On The Potential Of Manuka Honey And Platelet-Rich Plasma In Wound Healing, Scott A. Sell, Patricia Wolfe, Andrew J. Spence, Isaac Rodriguez, Jennifer M. Mccool, Rebecca L. Petrella, Koyal Garg, Jeffery J. Ericksen, Gary L. Bowlin

Biomedical Engineering Publications

Aim. The purpose of this study was to determine the in vitro response of cells critical to the wound healing process in culture media supplemented with a lyophilized preparation rich in growth factors (PRGF) and Manuka honey. Materials and Methods. This study utilized cell culture media supplemented with PRGF, as well as whole Manuka honey and the medical-grade Medihoney (MH), a Manuka honey product. The response of human fibroblasts (hDF), macrophages, and endothelial cells (hPMEC) was evaluated, with respect to cell proliferation, chemotaxis, collagen matrix production, and angiogenic potential, when subjected to culture with media containing PRGF, MH, Manuka honey, …

Quantification Of Collagen Organization Using Fractal Dimensions And Fourier Transforms, Kayt E. Frisch, Sarah E. Duenwald-Kuehl, Hirohito Kobayashi, Connie S. Chamberlain, Roderic S. Lakes, Ray Vanderby Jr.

Faculty Publications - Biomedical, Mechanical, and Civil Engineering

Collagen fibers and fibrils that comprise tendons and ligaments are disrupted or damaged during injury. Fibrillogenesis during healing produces a matrix that is initially quite disorganized, but remodels over time to resemble, but not replicate, the original roughly parallel microstructure. Quantification of these changes is traditionally a laborious and subjective task. In this work we applied two automated techniques, fast Fourier transformation (FFT) and fractal dimension analysis (FA) to quantify the organization of collagen fibers or fibrils. Using multi-photon images of collagen fibers obtained from rat ligament we showed that for healing ligaments, FA differentiates more clearly between the different …

Artificial Devices As A Viable Alternative To The Conventional Heart Transplant, Hadassah Radzik

The Science Journal of the Lander College of Arts and Sciences

The human heart is one of the most vital organs in the body. It distributes blood throughout the body, providing the body with oxygen and nutrition, and contributes to metabolism. When the heart fails, blood flow is impaired, thereby limiting the exchange of oxygen within the cardiopulmonary system as well as diminishing oxygenation and nutrition to the other major organs and periphery. The only current proven treatment for advanced heart failure is cardiac transplant. Given the heart’s importance and the scarcity of donated organs, modern medicine has experimented with the creation of an artificial heart. Because the heart is primarily …

Rapid, Large-Scale Production Of Full-Length, Human-Like Monoclonal Antibodies, Christopher M. Warner

KGI Theses and Dissertations

Current recombinant protein production systems require several months to develop. Existing systems fail to provide timely, flexible, and cost-effective therapies to protect against emergency mass-casualty infections or poisonings. As the identity of many new biological threat agents are unlikely to be known in advance, pre-emptive manufacturing and stockpiling of countermeasures cannot be performed. Preparedness for a biological catastrophe requires a radical solution to replace the current slow scale-up and manufacture of lifesaving medical countermeasures. Subunit vaccines and antibody fragments may be produced in bacteria, yeast, plant or insect cells. However, generation of full-length, human like glycosylated antibodies requires mammalian cell …

Increased Susceptibility Of Arterial Tissue To Wire Perforation With The Application Of High Frequency Mechanical Vibrations, Mark Wylie, Garrett Mcguinness, Graham Gavin

Articles

High frequency mechanical vibrations (20–50 kHz), delivered via small diameter flexible wire waveguides represent a minimally invasive technology for the treatment of chronic total occlusions (CTOs) and in other tissue ablation applications. Tissue disruption is reported to be caused by repetitive mechanical contact and cavitation. This work focuses on the effects of vibrating wire waveguides in contact with arterial tissue. An apparatus with clinically relevant parameters was used, characterized as operating at 22.5 kHz and delivering amplitudes of vibration of 17.8 - 34.3 µm (acoustic intensity, I_SATA: 1.03 - 3.83 W/cm²) via 1.0 mm diameter waveguides. …

Applications Of Capillary Electrophoresis For Studying Serum Albumin Enantioselection Of D,L-Tryptophan Analogs, Jelynn A. Stinson

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The pharmacokinetic difference between drug enantiomers is the impetus for developing analytical techniques to assess enantiomeric purity. Capillary electrophoresis (CE) is an analytical technique that is used for characterizing drug-protein binding. The pitfall to using CE for drug-protein binding studies is protein chiral selectors tend to adsorb onto capillary walls and cause changes in electroosmotic flow that lead to decreased enantioselection and migration time irreproducibility between consecutive injections. The experimental parameters for minimizing the adverse effects of protein adsorption are not clear from the literature.

Rinsing protocols to improve enantioselection and migration time repeatability were developed using the tryptophan-bovine serum …

Biological Engineering: Advances And Methods, Joel Schwartz

The Science Journal of the Lander College of Arts and Sciences

The last few decades have seen a tremendous growth in the field of bioengineering. As the need for further treatment and innovation for tissue repair, partial to full organ replication, and gene therapy continues to increase, the field of bioengineering will be tasked with curing and preventing disease and traumatic injuries. The two primary fields currently being focused on in the lab are the way cells interact and communicate to build tissues, and the nature and materials utilized in scaffolding to allow differentiation and migration when cells are seeded. Within those two fields are subsets of different methods, materials that …

Modification Of Behavior Of Elastin-Like Polypeptides By Changing Molecular Architecture, Ali Ghoorchian

ETD Archive

Elastin-like polypeptides (ELP) are environmentally responsive polymers that exhibit phase separation in response to external stimuli such as temperature, pH, light, and ionic strength. It has been shown that the sequence of the pentapeptide, its length, and the solution concentration are very important in the transition of the molecules from soluble to insoluble, but there has not been any detailed study of the effect of molecular architecture on the behavior of ELPs.In this study we designed, synthesized and characterized ELPs with different architectures and chemical identities to probe the effect of molecular design on the microscopic and macroscopic behavior of …

In Vitro Biomechanical Testing And Computational: Modeling In Spine, Mageswaran Prasath

ETD Archive

Two separate in vitro biomechanical studies were conducted on human cadaveric spines (Lumbar) to evaluate the stability following the implantation of two different spinal fixation devices interspinous fixation device (ISD) and Hybrid dynamic stabilizers. ISD was evaluated as a stand-alone and in combination with unilateral pedicle rod system. The results were compared against the gold standard, spinal fusion (bilateral pedicle rod system). The second study involving the hybrid dynamic system, evaluated the effect on adjacent levels using a hybrid testing protocol. A robotic spine testing system was used to conduct the biomechanical tests. This system has the ability to apply …

Myocardial T1 Mapping Techniques For Quantification Of Myocardial Fibrosis, Xiaopeng Zhou

ETD Archive

Identifying and quantifying diffuse myocardial fibrosis is important to provide insights into the relationship between myocardial fibrosis, diastolic and systolic dysfunction, as well as clinical outcomes. T1 mapping is a promising technique for noninvasively identifying diffuse myocardial fibrosis in heart failure. A quantitative T1 map provides sensitivity to the full range of T1 values and is advantageous over the traditional T1-weighted imaging by reducing the reliance on visual interpretation of the signal intensity in the myocardium. However, in-vivo myocardial T1 quantification is challenging because of cardiac and respiratory motion. During the past few years, a variety of T1 mapping techniques, …

Effects Of Magnesium Sulfate, Digestate And Other Inorganic Nutrients On The Phototrophic Growth Of The Green Microalga Scenedesmus Dimorphus, Jacob R. Schwenk

ETD Archive

The individual components of the growth media, notably magnesium, have a profound impact on the growth and lipid production of the green microalgae, Scenedesmus dimorphus. The goal of this work was to investigate these effects and explain the causes via multiple experiments. It is important to understand the aspects of algal growth because they have a significant impact on the commercial viability of microalgal lipids as a potential feedstock for biofuel production. Digestate, derived from bovine waste and a potential cost effective nutrient replacement for conventional media types, was found to maximize growth and lipid concentration in S. dimorphus at …

Effect Of Glucose Supplementation On Nighttime Biomass Loss And Productivity Of Microalgae Chlorella, Dhruvesh Shah

ETD Archive

Microalgae have been proven to be a promising source for the production of biofuel. It has higher oil yield than any other food crop. Oil yield from microalgae is 7 to 13 times higher than the best food crop. There are several issues to be addressed for economic production of biofuel from microalgae. One such issue is cultivation of microalgae. Algae can be cultivated photoautotrophically or heterotrophically. Algae grown photoautotrophically lose up to 35 of the biomass during nighttime. Heterotrophic cultivation of microalgae has been proven to be resulting in faster microalgae production compared to photoautotrophic growth, but requires use …

Characterization Of Elastic-Like Polypeptide Micelles Using Capillary Viscometry, Sumit H. Kambow

ETD Archive

Elastin-like polypeptides (ELPs) are a part of the family of responsive polymers. These polymers can be made to respond to a wide variety of stimuli, including temperature, pH, salt, concentration, light, and solvent. Elastin-like polypeptides are soluble in water at low temperatures but they become hydrophobic and insoluble above their transition temperature. Elastin-like polypeptides, (GVGVP)40-foldon and (GVGVP)60-foldon, were expressed in bacterial system. These ELPs above their transition temperature, Tt, at low salt (< 45mM) and high pH (> pH 10) assemble into micelles where the hydrophobic tails phase separate in the interior of the micelle as an immiscible coacervate phase. The oligomerization domain termed as …

Analysis Of Microstructure And Macrosegregation For Directional Solidification Of Al-7 Wt Si Alloy With A Cross-Section Change At Growth Speeds Of 10 And 29.1 [Mu]M/S, Luke Johnson

ETD Archive

No abstract provided.

Numerical And Experimental Investigation Of Vascular Suture Closure, Linxia Gu, Ananth Ram Mahanth Kasavajhala, Haili Lang, James M. Hammel

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Faculty Publications

Purpose — In order to optimize the performance of the suture for tissue closure, it is essential to develop strategies for devising new and improved techniques that can visualize and compare various suturing techniques. This paper describes an experimental and numerical investigation on the performance of sutured tissue.

Methods — In the experiments, two pieces of glutaraldehyde cross-linked bovine pericardium were sutured together through simple running suture and tensioned to study the performance of the sutured tissue. During testing, the tension load and the total displacement of the specimen were recorded. The strain field of the specimen was simultaneously captured …

Studying The Glial Cell Response To Biomaterials And Surface Topography For Improving The Neural Electrode Interface, Evon S. Ereifej

Wayne State University Dissertations

Neural electrode devices hold great promise to help people with the restoration of lost functions, however, research is lacking in the biomaterial design of a stable, long-term device. Current devices lack long term functionality, most have been found unable to record neural activity within weeks after implantation due to the development of glial scar tissue (Polikov et al., 2006; Zhong and Bellamkonda, 2008). The long-term effect of chronically implanted electrodes is the formation of a glial scar made up of reactive astrocytes and the matrix proteins they generate (Polikov et al., 2005; Seil and Webster, 2008). Scarring is initiated when …

Dynamic Endothelialization Of Aortic Heart Valve Scaffolds, Richard Pascal

All Theses

Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer worldwide affecting both the heart and blood vessels. Valvular heart disease can arise from calcification, and structural deterioration resulting in a stenotic or regurgitant valve incapable of proper function. With approximately 275,000 valve replacements performed annually worldwide, the need for replacement heart valves is well established. Currently, treatment of valvular heart disease is limited to two options (mechanical and bioprosthetic). Both replacement valves have their own drawbacks, which have driven research in the bioengineering field to focus on the development of a tissue engineered heart valve (TEHV) capable of growth and self-repair.
A …

Investigations Into Causes Of Failure Of Regenerative Peripheral Nerve Interfaces, R. Collins Watson

Bioengineering Dissertations - Archive

All highly selective methods of neural interfacing for mental control of a robotic prosthesis tested to date have exhibited high rates of failure over time. Regenerative peripheral nerve interfaces (RPNIs) may offer the greatest potential among the proposed technologies for providing the number of degrees of freedom necessary to control a robotic limb, but are unacceptable for clinical use due to several shortcomings of current technology: (1) all RPNIs tested to date have exhibited signal loss over time due to biological mechanisms of rejection of implanted electrodes; (2) all chronically tested interfaces have suffered from high rates of device failure …

Pleiotrophin Enhance Nerve Regeneration Across Long Gap Peripheral Nerve Defects, Swarup Narayan Dash

Bioengineering Dissertations - Archive

Peripheral nerve injuries resulting in extensive loss in nerve continuity pose a challenge in reconstructive surgery. Autografts still remain the treatment of choice for nerve defects despite the need of donor nerve harvest and the associated morbidity of this procedure. In contrast to short gap injuries, isografts achieve sub normal functional recovery for gaps longer than a critical 30 mm length, and simple tubularization methods fail completely. The regenerative failure of peripheral nerves through long gaps can be postulated to the lack of appropriate growth substrate and trophic support. We hypothesize that for successful nerve regeneration across long-gap nerve defects, …

Magnetic-Based Theranostic Nanoparticles For Prostate Cancer Management, Aniket Sharadrao Wadajkar

Bioengineering Dissertations - Archive

With an increasing rate of cancers, the need for effective cancer management has led to the development of theranostic systems for diagnosis and therapy. Conventional techniques for cancer management have limited success due to inaccurate diagnosis and treatment side effects. Development of magnetic-based theranostic nanoparticles (MBTN) may overcome these limitations with the advantages of magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) such as magnetic targeting, hyperthermia, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrast agents; and advantages of polymer coatings for carrying payloads and allowing bioconjugation for active targeting applications. Aim of this research was to develop multifunctional MBTNs for prostate cancer management. First, biodegradable photoluminescent …

A Novel Minimally Invasive Dual-Modality Fiber Optic Probe For Prostate Cancer Detection, Vikrant Sharma

Bioengineering Dissertations - Archive

Prostate cancer is the most common form of cancer in males, and is the second leading cause of cancer related deaths in United States. In prostate cancer diagnostics and theapy, there is a critical need for a minimally invasive tool for in vivo evaluation of prostate tissue. Such a tool finds its niche in improving TRUS (trans-rectal ultrasound) guided biopsy procedure, surgical margin assessment during radical prostatectomy, and active surveillance of patients with a certain risk levels. This work is focused on development of a fiber-based dual-modality optical device (dMOD), to differentiate prostate cancer from benign tissue, in vivo. dMOD …