Biomedical Commons^™

Mechanical Reliability Of Implantable Polyimide-Based Magnetic Microactuators For Biofouling Removal, Christian G. Figueroa-Espada, Qi Yang, Hyowon Lee

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Hydrocephalus is a neurological disorder that typically requires a long-term implantation of a shunt system to manage its symptoms. These shunt systems are notorious for their extremely high failure rate. More than 40% of all implanted shunt systems fail within the first year of implantation. On average, 85% of all hydrocephalus patients with shunt systems undergo at least two shunt-revision surgeries within 10 years of implantation. A large portion of this high failure rate can be attributed to biofouling-related obstructions and infections. Previously, we developed flexible polyimide-based magnetic microactuators to remove obstructions formed on hydrocephalus shunts. To test the long-term …

Effects Of Hearing Aid Amplification On Robust Neural Coding Of Speech, Jonathan Daniel Boley

Open Access Dissertations

Hearing aids are able to restore some hearing abilities for people with auditory impairments, but background noise remains a significant problem. Unfortunately, we know very little about how speech is encoded in the auditory system, particularly in impaired systems with prosthetic amplifiers. There is growing evidence that relative timing in the neural signals (known as spatiotemporal coding) is important for speech perception, but there is little research that relates spatiotemporal coding and hearing aid amplification.

This research uses a combination of computational modeling and physiological experiments to characterize how hearing aids affect vowel coding in noise at the level of …

Effects Of Dip-Coated Films On The Properties Of Implantable Intracortical Microelectrodes, Salah Sommakia

Open Access Dissertations

The successful clinical use of implantable intracortical microelectrodes (ICMs) to treat certain types of deafness, blindness, and paralysis is limited by a reactive tissue response (RTR) of the brain. This RTR culminates in the formation of a tight glial scar and a loss of neuronal density around implanted ICMs, and is accompanied by a decrease in signal to noise ratio and an increase in impedance. While no comprehensive mechanistic understanding of the underlying biology is currently agreed upon in the field, a general consensus exists around a highly volatile acute RTR phase. During this acute phase, the electrical properties of …