Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons^™

Small Animal Thermal Support Device: Thermoregulation System For Scireq Flexivent Chamber, Alexander Dickey, Ashkhan Hojati, Matthew James, Kathleen Vermillera

Capstone Design Expo Posters

During ventilation induced lung injury (VILI) experiments, anesthetized mice lose the ability to regulate their core body temperature. Without maintaining homeostasis, the experimental data may be compromised due to changes in the rodent’s internal functions. Traditional heating techniques utilize a water circulation heating system that is unable to fit inside flexiVent ventilator testing chambers. The objective of this project is to design and build an automatic thermoregulatory feedback system to regulate the core body temperature of a mouse inside individual testing chambers throughout the duration of the experiment. The project deliverables include a functioning prototype that achieves safe and effective …

New Design Of Nasogastric Decompression Tube That Incorporates A Self-Cleaning Brushing Mechanism, Nichole Abla, Lindsay Rucker, Paige Schroder

Senior Theses

Many hospitalized patients require the removal of secretions that accumulate in the stomach and must be removed by a nasogastric tube, which unfortunately clogs often. This project outlines the redesign of the nasogastric tube that will ideally prevent nasogastric tube clogging by incorporating a brush mechanism and a contracting tip mechanism, to act as preventative measures against clogging.

3d Printing In Healthcare, Caleb Branch

The Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

Technology is everywhere. Technology surrounds every aspect of 21^st century life. It is in the cell phones we use, the cars we drive, and even the food we eat. A large portion of modern technology used is taken for granted and overlooked. Despite this, some technology fields continue to grow. Biomedical engineering, specifically 3D printing’s applications to healthcare, has been often overlooked until. Regardless of its status in the mainstream, 3D printing is prosperous in healthcare and its future looks bright. This piece analyzes 3D printing in healthcare. It hones in on the finer details of each specific topic, …

The Application Of Biomedical Engineering Techniques To The Diagnosis And Management Of Tropical Diseases: A Review, Fatimah Ibrahim, Tzer Hwai Gilbert Thio, Tarig Faisal, Michael Neuman

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

This paper reviews a number of biomedical engineering approaches to help aid in the detection and treatment of tropical diseases such as dengue, malaria, cholera, schistosomiasis, lymphatic filariasis, ebola, leprosy, leishmaniasis, and American trypanosomiasis (Chagas). Many different forms of non-invasive approaches such as ultrasound, echocardiography and electrocardiography, bioelectrical impedance, optical detection, simplified and rapid serological tests such as lab-on-chip and micro-/nano-fluidic platforms and medical support systems such as artificial intelligence clinical support systems are discussed. The paper also reviewed the novel clinical diagnosis and management systems using artificial intelligence and bioelectrical impedance techniques for dengue clinical applications.

A Device For The Objective Assessment Of Adhd Using Eye Movements, Ankita Dosaj, Jefferson Overlin, Cassie Turnage

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a commonly diagnosed psychiatric disorder characterized by lack of focus, self-control,and hyperactivity. ADHD is difficult to diagnose without extensive observation by an expert, and even then is often misdiagnosed. Current methods of pediatric diagnosis rely on subjective measures of activity and behavior relative to other children [3]. Proper diagnosis is critical in preventing unnecessary prescription of the powerful, habit-forming nature of the drugs used to manage ADHD, such as Adderall and Ritalin [1][5]. Research has shown that patients with ADHD show abnormalities in reading tests and antisaccade tests, as these tests gauge ability to …

Non-Invasive Blood Glucose Monitoring System, Brittany Martinez, Brittany Noah, David Decker

Capstone Design Expo Posters

The objective of this project is to create a non-invasive hypoglycemic alert system that will detect a drop in blood sugar in type 1 diabetics during sleep. This will be achieved by creating an algorithm that couples heart rate variability with skin conductance to increase the accuracy of hypoglycemia detection. The device will be housed in a torso strap that will include: electrodes located over the user’s rib cage, a skin conductance sensor placed in the user’s armpit, a microcontroller to collect and process the data, and vibrating motors that will awaken the patient if hypoglycemia is detected. Integrating the …

A Non-Contact System For Measuring Wrist And Carpal Kinematics, Shruthi Muralidharan, Kristina Hendel, Joseph Newton, Vivek Patel

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Ligamentous and bone injuries in the wrist affect tens of thousands of adults per year and leads to abnormal function. Surgical procedures as well as physical therapy intended to restorefunction have room for improvement. Measuring wrist kinematics of the small carpal bones is necessary to understand the effect of ligamentous injury during normal motion.Currently there are motion analysis systems that are used to track large scale movementfor total body kinematics such as gait analysis. The accuracy of these systems is catered toward capturing gross movement and cannot precisely measure on the order of millimeters necessary for carpal kinematics. There are …

Time And Temperature Dependent Surface Tension Measurements Of Responsive Protein-Based Polymer Surfactant Solutions, Hakan Celik

ETD Archive

A three-armed star elastin-like polypeptide (ELP-foldon) has thermoreversible character which exhibits phase separation above a transition temperature (Tt) in physiologic salt concentrations. At lower salt concentration, the ELP-foldon behaves like a thermoresponsive surfactant, exhibiting micelle formation above its Tt. The purpose of this study is characterize the surfactant behavior of the ELP-foldon at air-liquid interface by measuring the surface tension. The surface tension is measured as a function of time for different ELP concentrations from 10 nM to 50 ℗æM and over range of temperatures from 25 to 35 ℗¿ using the axisymmetric drop shape analysis (ADSA). The ADSA is …

Flow-Cytometry Machine For The Developing World, Paul Howell, Jewel Nkwocha, Jaynie Laverty

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Flow cytometry provides critical diagnostic, measurement, and research applications across many healthcare and biological disciplines. Its use in the detection of blood-cancers, HIV/AIDS, cell differentiation, and viral detection is unique and unparalleled. Despite flow cytometry’s vast array of applications, its use is limited by expense. Rather than individual labs being able to afford a dedicated machine, core facilities are developed and the research is exported. In addition, flow cytometry’s high costs create a barrier to its implementation in developing nations.

There were 35 million people living with HIV in 2013, nearly 1% of the world’s population. There are more than …

Independent Exercise Assistive Device For Individuals With Visual Impairments, Ashley Duke, Megan Goldberg, Lindsay Schnur

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Physical exercise is challenging for individuals who are blind because they lack the spatial awareness necessary to imitate described motions for exercises, and additionally require physical guidance. The current solutions involve tactile equipment to assist in body placement, but a person with low vision cannot compare their own position to the correct position and adjust properly. The proposed solution is an instructional yoga program that will give feedback to the user based on her exercise performance, allowing people who are blind to be able to perform these exercises independently at home. The design will incorporate the Skeletal Tracking program of …

3-D Culture Systemfor Rapid Expansion Of Human Neural Stem Cells, Waleed Ilyas, Jeeyun Park, Dan Reep, Lawrence Talej

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Research into stem cells is a growing field of contemporary biology due to their extraordinary potential to develop into myriad cell types for use in regenerative medicine and research applications. Stem cells can vary from adult stem cells, embryonic stem cells, or induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS. Due to the high potential for therapeutic applications, or individualized medicine, there is an increasing demand for stem cell quantities since a critical cell count must be met to demonstrate any therapeutic effect. The problem lies in the amount of time it takes to culture this critical cell count. Isolating fibroblasts in …

Toy For Preschoolers With Deaf-Blindness, Allison R. Beckmann, Chelsea B. Gebs, Julia-Grace Polich

Capstone Design Expo Posters

There are approximately 70,000-100,000 people living in America that are diagnosed as deaf-blind. Since children with deaf-blindness are an extreme minority in the US, research, toys and technological advancements for these children get overlooked. As a result, the developmental processes of children with deaf-blindness are delayed by several years, compared to normal children, due to the lack of resources available to encourage learning. According to Virginia’s Department of Education standards of learning for preschoolers, development physically, mathematically,of environmental awareness and of a sense of self are core requirements for Kindergarten. Therefore, there is a need for a toy that will …

Decellularization Of Porcine Lung Tissue, Kirsten Hulbert, Linh Ta, Lumumba Reid, Mahir Dagra, Baltej Dhillon

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Our project aims to standardize the decellularization of a porcine lung by creating a bioreactor to house the lung, automating the decellularization process and developing a protocol that will increase the precision and the repeatability of the process. Our deliverables include a working prototype, an automated system that will inform the user when the decellularization process is complete, a pressure sensor to control perfusion, and automated pressurized pulses that will increase the rate of decellularization.

Our accomplishments thus far include: a design for a working prototype that will decellularize a porcine lung, determining the proper rate to perfuse the lung, …

Device To Deliver Endodontic Material For Temporary Dental Fillings, Garrett N. Cyprus, Hisham Kamoun, Gireesh B. Reddy, Ali Salman

Capstone Design Expo Posters

Root canal therapy requires patients be treated over several visits to clean and shape the pulp chamber. In endodontic treatments, cotton wool is placed beneath the temporary filling to preserve the space of the pulp chamber and to prevent any blockage of the root canals with temporary filling between clinic visits. Despite its simple application and affordability, cotton wool can lead to fibrous remnants in the pulp chamber or become incorporated into the temporary filling, which can lead to micro-leakage or bacterial colonization on the cotton fibers and subsequent infection.

Gelatin capsules or silica gels are proposed endodontic materials which …

Determining The Transport Enhancement Of Sodium Fluorescein In Mechanically-Loaded Canine Tibia, Andrew Joseph Zak

ETD Archive

Quantitative research concerning the impact of mechanical loading on the transport properties of bone has several critical applications. One such application is the effect of a microgravity environment, where the lack of mechanical forces on bone has been shown to negatively impact both growth and repair. A method has been developed in our lab that can potentially allow for the measurement of the effective permeability of large molecules (i.e., 300-15,000 Da in size) in bone tissue under both unloaded and mechanically loaded conditions. In proof-of-concept experiments, previous students have measured the effective diffusivity of the model solute, sodium fluorescein (376 …

Development Of Biomechanical Analysis Techniques For Fatigue Of Transtibial Prosthetic Socket And Pylon Interactions, Thomas Z. Sudbury

Honors Theses

The lack of formal, engineering based information is prevalent in the prosthetic industry. Currently, very few prosthetic manufacturing companies can definitively tell their patients how long their products will last. Because of this lack of information, many amputee patients will experience failure of their transtibial prosthetic device during daily activities. One such failure occurs from the fatigue of everyday use. Fatigue failures originate from the repeated application of certain loading conditions. These repeated loads usually occur for millions of cycles before a transtibial prosthetic catastrophically fails. The purpose of this study is to develop a testing procedure and apparatus that …

Design Of Recombinant Tenebrio Molitor Antifreeze Protein For Purification Using Elastin-Like Polypeptide Tag, Joongseok Oh

ETD Archive

Fusion protein technologies can aid to improve solubility of recombinant protein from microorganisms and help recombinant protein purification. Elastin-like polypeptides (ELP) as a fusion tag can be utilized to facilitate the purification of recombinant proteins because ELP can provide its thermally responsive behavior to ELP tagged proteins. An ELP tag can be used as the purification carrier through inverse transition cycling (ITC), which is a simple and non chromatographic separation process. The purification through ITC can reduce cost and can be quickly performed compared to other purification methods. However, we further considered ELP tag removal because it may possibly hinder …

Potential Optimal Gait Performance Of Mauch S-N-S Prosthetic Knee Configurations As Predicted By Dynamic Modeling, Chih-Hao Chien

ETD Archive

Patients with prosthetic legs routinely suffer from abnormal gait patterns which can cause health issues and eventually lower the quality of their lives. Despite the half-century advance in the technology of prosthetic knees, from the purely mechanical to microprocessor controlled systems, patient testing suggests that very little progress has been made in the quality of the kinetics and kinematics of amputee gait. Moreover, the cost of microprocessor controlled prosthetic knees may be 10 times more than the purely mechanical knees. While prosthetic knees have become more complex and expensive, it is not proven that the prosthetic knee is a central …

Evolutionary Optimization Of Atrial Fibrillation Diagnostic Algorithms, Aref Smiley

ETD Archive

The goal of this research is to introduce an improved method for detecting atrial fibrillation (AF). The foundation of our algorithm is the irregularity of the RR intervals in the electrocardiogram (ECG) signal, and their correlation with AF. Three statistical techniques, including root mean squares of successive differences (RMSSD), turning points ratio (TPR), and Shannon entropy (SE), are used to detect RR interval irregularity. We use the Massachusetts Institution of Technology / Beth Israel Hospital (MIT-BIH) atrial fibrillation databases and their annotations to tune the parameters of the statistical methods by biogeography-based optimization (BBO), which is an evolutionary optimization algorithm. …

A Robotic Neuro-Musculoskeletal Simulator For Spine Research, Robb W. Colbrunn

ETD Archive

An influential conceptual framework advanced by Panjabi represents the living spine as a complex neuromusculoskeletal system whose biomechanical functioning is rather finely dependent upon the interactions among and between three principal subsystems: the passive musculoskeletal subsystem (osteoligamentous spine plus passive mechanical contributions of the muscles), the active musculoskeletal subsystem (muscles and tendons), and the neural and feedback subsystem (neural control centers and feedback elements such as mechanoreceptors located in the soft tissues) [1]. The interplay between subsystems readily encourages "thought experiments" of how pathologic changes in one subsystem might influence another--for example, prompting one to speculate how painful arthritic changes …

Scaffold Composition And Architecture Critically Regulate Extracellular Matrix Synthesis By Cardiomyocytes, Arsela Gishto

ETD Archive

Heart failure accounts for over 5 million cases in the U.S. A major onset of this is myocardial infarction, which causes the myocardium to loose cardiomyocytes and transform into a scar tissue. Given that the adult infarcted cardiac tissue has a limited ability to regenerate, alternative methods to restore the damaged area need to be developed. The goal of these approaches is to design an optimal scaffold that can retain and deliver cardiomyocytes at the site of damaged myocardium. This tissue engineering approach would allow cardiac reconstruction by replacing the lost cardiomyocytes, delivering the required biomolecules, as well as remodeling …

Improving Health Care Quality And Safety: The Development And Assessment Of Laparoscopic Surgery Instrumentation, Practices And Procedures, Bernadette Mccrory

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

Adverse events due to medical errors are a leading cause of death in the United States exceeding the mortality rates of motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer and AIDS. Improvements can and should be made to reduce the rates of preventable surgical errors since they account for nearly half of all adverse events within hospitals. Although minimally invasive surgery has proven patient benefits such as reduced postoperative pain and hospital stay, its operative environment imposes substantial physical and cognitive strain on the surgeon increasing the risk of error. In order to mitigate errors and protect patients, a multidisciplinary approach was taken …

One-Dimensional Radial Diffusion Of Small Molecules (376 Da) In Bone Tissue, Kurt W. Farrell

ETD Archive

The flow of nutrients through any biological tissue is important to maintain homeostasis. If the transport process is understood, medical research teams can better design medications, prosthetic implants, and tissue scaffolds. Additionally, transport rates help physicians to better understand disease states and wound healing, including minor injuries such as breaks and sprains, which will aid in better diagnoses. We developed a novel method that measures the rate of diffusion in vitro, of fluorescein sodium salt. Samples were incubated at 37°C in a 5 CO2 atmosphere for various periods of time. Samples were sliced and analyzed using Image-Pro Plus and MATLAB …

Semi-Automatic Segmentation Of Normal Female Pelvic Floor Structures From Magnetic Resonance Images, Xiaolong Li

ETD Archive

Stress urinary incontinence (SUI) and pelvic organ prolapse (POP) are important health issues affecting millions of American women. Investigation of the cause of SUI and POP requires a better understand of the anatomy of female pelvic floor. In addition, pre-surgical planning and individualized treatment plans require development of patient-specific three-dimensional or virtual reality models. The biggest challenge in building those models is to segment pelvic floor structures from magnetic resonance images because of their complex shapes, which make manual segmentation labor-intensive and inaccurate. In this dissertation, a quick and reliable semi-automatic segmentation method based on a shape model is proposed. …

Biomedical Technology: Supporting Movement, Petros Katsioloudis

STEMPS Faculty Publications

According to the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, an estimated 8.5 million children 21 years and younger have a disability (Jans & Stoddard, 1999). After about a decade, with the development of new and sophisticated materials (aluminum alloys, titanium alloys, and carbon fibers) and the integration of electronics, it was then possible to significantly improve the performance of prostheses, built with the so-called endo skeletal (or skeletal-modular) method (Mora, Beratni & Pedrotti, 2006).

Spectral Analysis Of Pathological Acoustic Speech Waveforms, Priyanka Medida

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Biomedical engineering is the application of engineering principles and techniques to the medical field. The design and problem solving skills of engineering are combined with medical and biological science, which improves medical disorder diagnosis and treatment. The purpose of this study is to develop an automated procedure for detecting excessive jitter in speech signals, which is useful for differentiating normal from pathologic speech. The fundamental motivation for this research is that tools are needed by speech pathologists and laryngologists for use in the early detection and treatment of laryngeal disorders. Acoustical analysis of speech was performed to analyze various features …

Characterization Of Motor Adaptation And Limb Posture Regulation During Arm Reaching Movements Following Stroke, Robert A. Scheidt, Tina M. Stoeckmann

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Whether attempting to pour water into a handheld glass, or simply trying to hold a young child's hand, many activities of daily living require interaction with unpredictable or uncertain mechanical environments. Here we describe a systems identification study that used a planar manipulandum to characterize how hemiparetic stroke survivors adapt reaching movements to novel mechanical environments. By analyzing trial-by-trial variations in hand path kinematics, we found that stroke survivors are less likely than neurologically-intact subjects to adjust motor commands for upcoming movements based on hand trajectory errors experienced on previous trials. This ability is most significantly compromised in subjects with …