A Low-Power, Highly Stabilized Three-Electrode Potentiostat Using Subthreshold Techniques, Melika Roknsharifi

Doctoral Dissertations

Implantable micro- and nano- sensors and implantable microdevices (IMDs) have demonstrated potential for monitoring various physiological parameters such as glucose, lactate, CO₂ [carbon dioxide], pH, etc. Potentiostats are essential components of electrochemical sensors such as glucose monitoring devices for diabetic patients. Diabetes is a metabolic disorder associated with insufficient production or inefficient utilization of insulin. The most important role of this enzyme is to regulate the metabolic breakdown of glucose generating the necessary energy for human activities. Diabetic patients typically monitor their blood glucose levels by pricking a fingertip with a lancing device and applying the blood to a …

Energy Harvesting Of Human Kinetic Movement, David Marusiak, Julia Carrillo

Electrical Engineering

Development of kinetic energy scavenging applications from the human body necessitates additional research to assist in designating a mounting position for a potential device. A data acquisition system adequately provides a parametric average power comparison among four locations on the body (waist, upper arm, hand, and calf) for both a male and female subject. Experimentally, the hand-held device provided the highest average power. Thus, subsequent investigation at set speeds provides further analysis of the output’s characteristically linear behavior. The physical energy-harvesting device features a plastic tube casing wrapped with the stationary coiled wire through which a neodymium magnet oscillates. While …

Development Of A Novel Handheld Device For Active Compensation Of Physiological Tremor, Abhijit Saxena

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In microsurgery, the human hand imposes certain limitations in accurately positioning the tip of a device such as scalpel. Any errors in the motion of the hand make microsurgical procedures difficult and involuntary motions such as hand tremors can make some procedures significantly difficult to perform. This is particularly true in the case of vitreoretinal microsurgery. The most familiar source of involuntary motion is physiological tremor. Real-time compensation of tremor is, therefore, necessary to assist surgeons to precisely position and manipulate the tool-tip to accurately perform a microsurgery. In this thesis, a novel handheld device (AID) is described for compensation …

Real-Time Heart Model For Implantable Cardiac Device Validation And Verification, Zhihao Jiang, Miroslav Pajic, Allison T. Connolly, Sanjay Dixit, Rahul Mangharam

Rahul Mangharam

Designing bug-free medical device software is difficult, especially in complex implantable devices that may be used in unanticipated contexts. Safety recalls of pacemakers and implantable cardioverter defibrillators due to firmware problems between 1990 and 2000 affected over 200,000 devices, comprising 41% of the devices recalled and are increasing in frequency. There is currently no formal methodology or open experimental platform to validate and verify the correct operation of medical device software. To this effect, a real-time Virtual Heart Model (VHM) has been developed to model the electrophysiological operation of the functioning (i.e. during normal sinus rhythm) and malfunctioning (i.e. during …

Microcontroller Based Ecg Amplifier, Berney Montavon

Undergraduate Research Posters 2012

A microprocessor that reads ECG data and detects heart arrhythmias can help keep people safe while working in high-risk environments.

Low Power Data Acquisition For Microimplant Biometric Monitoring Of Tremors, Tania Khanna '01

Doctoral Dissertations

In recent years, trends in the medical industry have created a growing demand for implantable medical devices. In particular, the need to provide doctors a means to continuously monitor biometrics over long time scales with increased precision is paramount to efficient healthcare. To make medical implants more attractive, there is a need to reduce their size and power consumption. Small medical implants would allow for less invasive procedures, greater comfort for patients, and increased patient compliance. Reductions in power consumption translate to longer battery life. The two primary limitations to the size of small medical implants are the batteries that …

Metrics For Evaluating Surgical Microscope Usage During Myringotomy, Arefin M. Shamsil

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Abstract

Although teaching and learning surgical microscope manoeuvring is a fundamental step in middle ear surgical training, currently there is no objective method to teach or assess this skill. This thesis presents an experimental study designed to implement and test sets of metrics capable of numerically evaluating microscope manoeuvrability and qualitatively assessing surgical expertise of a subject during a middle ear surgery called myringotomy. The experiment involved performing a myringotomy on a fixed cadaveric ear. As participants, experienced ear-nose-throat (ENT) surgeons and ENT surgical residents were invited. While performing the procedure, their microscope manoeuvring motions were captured as translational and …

Preoperative Planning Of Robotics-Assisted Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery Under Uncertainty, Hamidreza Azimian

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this thesis, a computational framework for patient-specific preoperative planning of Robotics-Assisted Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery (RAMICS) is developed. It is expected that preoperative planning of RAMICS will improve the rate of success by considering robot kinematics, patient-specific thoracic anatomy, and procedure-specific intraoperative conditions. Given the significant anatomical features localized in the preoperative computed tomography images of a patient's thorax, port locations and robot orientations (with respect to the patient's body coordinate frame) are determined to optimize characteristics such as dexterity, reachability, tool approach angles and maneuverability. In this thesis, two approaches for preoperative planning of RAMICS are proposed that …

Biomechanical Modeling For Lung Tumor Motion Prediction During Brachytherapy And Radiotherapy, Zahra Shirzadi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

A novel technique is proposed to develop a biomechanical model for estimating lung’s tumor position as a function of respiration cycle time. Continuous tumor motion is a major challenge in lung cancer treatment techniques where the tumor needs to be targeted; e.g. in external beam radiotherapy and brachytherapy. If not accounted for, this motion leads to areas of radiation over and/or under dosage for normal tissue and tumors. In this thesis, biomechanical models were developed for lung tumor motion predication in two distinct cases of lung brachytherapy and lung external beam radiotherapy. The lung and other relevant surrounding organs geometries, …

Fabrication And Characterization Of Thinner Solid-State Nanopores, Denis Forbi Tita

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Solid State nanopores that are fabricated by the ion beam sculpting process and electron beam drilling have shown great promise as a sensing device for DNA and protein molecules. Even though biological pores such as the alpha-Haemolysin have been in use for quite some time, the use of solid state Nanopores in single biomolecule detection has been on the rise since the mid 1990s. Solid State nanopores have an advantage over biological pores in that they are more robust, stable, and can be sculpted to any desired size for use in translocation experiments. One of the major challenges in Nanopore …

A Wireless And Digital Electrode Bus Topology For Biopotential Measurement, Mark Nolan, Edward Burke, Eugene Coyle

Conference Papers

The conventional biopotential measurement configuration utilises long lead wires which connect measuring electrodes to signal conditioning circuitry. The majority of bioelectric signals that are measured from the human body have a tiny signal amplitude (5µV-5mV range) and thus any interference that is induced on the lead wires can have a detrimental effect on the original signal. In this paper, we present an alternative configuration, in which digitisation occurs on the electrode, potentially providing enhanced signal measurement as well as significant benefits in terms of the simplification of the physical interconnections between electrodes. Multiple electrodes are combined to form a digital …

Polygrasp: Reach; Myoelectric Prosthetic Hand Iteration, Devon Patrick Augustus, Mighells Blaed Deuel, Ian Noel Fraser, Nicholas Philip Moesser

Mechanical Engineering

Amputations are a common occurrence in soldiers returning home who have suffered the effects of IED and munitions explosions. For upper limb amputees, trans-radial amputations are the most common. Traditional hook devices do not offer an adequate level of normalcy for users, prompting the use of myoelectric devices. While current myoelectric devices do offer a more natural experience, they come with a host of other problems that makes their adoption by service personnel not desirable or not permitted by the VA. PolyGrasp Reach seeks to reduce weight and cost and improve performance. This addresses several of the issues with devices …

A Knowledge-Based Clinical Toxicology Consultant For Diagnosing Single Exposures, Joel D. Schipper, Douglas D. Dankel Ii, A. Antonio Arroyo, Jay L. Schauben

Publications

Objective: Every year, toxic exposures kill twelve hundred Americans. To aid in the timely diagnosis and treatment of such exposures, this research investigates the feasibility of a knowledge-based system capable of generating differential diagnoses for human exposures involving unknown toxins.

Methods: Data mining techniques automatically extract prior probabilities and likelihood ratios from a database managed by the Florida Poison Information Center. Using observed clinical effects, the trained system produces a ranked list of plausible toxic exposures. The resulting system was evaluated using 30,152 single exposure cases. In addition, the effects of two filters for refining diagnosis based on …

Control System For Glucose Detector System, David Smith

Electrical Engineering

In this paper I design and test on a prove of concept level a control/timing circuit for a blood glucose detector built in a previous senior project. The specifications of the design given are to properly power the detector with a low power source. The design is completed on a transistor level basis using Cadence Virtuoso Software. The system is design from the ground up; designing, building, and testing smaller circuits first then combined into increasingly larger circuits till the completed circuit is finished. The design used to based off of the 555 Timer and uses differential pairs, CMOS designed …

Biomedical Matching Gui Development, Nazia Sarang

Electrical and Computer Engineering Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Biomedical researchers constantly search for new methods to diagnose the extent of joint injuries in live human subjects. In order to achieve this, the researchers need to know the accurate three dimensional kinematic data of bones and joints and to accurately quantify how bones in a joint move relative to one another during dynamic activities. Algorithms have been developed previously to estimate the exact spatial position and movement of the bones. These methods involved generation of digitally reconstructed radiographs (DRR) from a three dimensional CT scan image of human joint with known position and orientation and comparing it with the …

Design Of A User Interface To Investigate The Role Of 3d Spatial Reasoning In Surgical Training, Ladan Ashrafi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this thesis, a 3D interactive environment for measurement of spatial ability using Mental Rotation Test was designed and implemented. The spatial ability of two groups of participants (novices and experts) was evaluated using the implemented software and compared to the result from Embedded Figure Test. In Embedded Figure Test, only 15.63% of the experts’ responses were incorrect (with score of 6.75 ± 1.50 out of 8), compared to 57.00% for novices (with score of 3.44 ± 1.51). No significant difference was found between scores of the two group from Mental Rotation Test; however, experts responded significantly faster than novices …

Development And Experimental Analysis Of Wireless High Accuracy Ultra-Wideband Localization Systems For Indoor Medical Applications, Michael Joseph Kuhn

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses several interesting and relevant problems in the field of wireless technologies applied to medical applications and specifically problems related to ultra-wideband high accuracy localization for use in the operating room. This research is cross disciplinary in nature and fundamentally builds upon microwave engineering, software engineering, systems engineering, and biomedical engineering. A good portion of this work has been published in peer reviewed microwave engineering and biomedical engineering conferences and journals. Wireless technologies in medicine are discussed with focus on ultra-wideband positioning in orthopedic surgical navigation. Characterization of the operating room as a medium for ultra-wideband signal transmission …

Multi-Circle Detections For An Automatic Medical Diagnosis System, Dingran Lu

Master's Theses

Real-time multi-circle detection has been a challenging problem in the field of biomedical image processing, due to the variable sizes and non-ideal shapes of cells in microscopic images. In this study, two new multi-circle detection algorithms are developed to facilitate an automatic bladder cancer diagnosis system: one is a modified circular Hough Transform algorithm integrated with edge gradient information; and the other one is a stochastic search approach based on real valued artificial immune systems. Computer simulation results show both algorithms outperform traditional methods such as the Hough Transform and the geometric feature based method, in terms of both precision …

A Refreshable And Portable E-Braille System For The Blind And Visually Impaired, Mohammad Saadeh, Mohamed Trabia

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

• Braille is a communication system to assist the blind and visually impaired.
• Present an approach to measure fingertip forces while identifying Braille characters.
• Implement a force sensory feedback in the device to measure the force developed on the fingertip.
• Introduce a preliminary design for the device.
• Build a prototype for the device and evaluate its functionality and integrate its components

Haptics-Enabled Teleoperation For Robotics-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery, Ali Talasaz

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The lack of force feedback (haptics) in robotic surgery can be considered to be a safety risk leading to accidental tissue damage and puncturing of blood vessels due to excessive forces being applied to tissue and vessels or causing inefficient control over the instruments because of insufficient applied force. This project focuses on providing a satisfactory solution for introducing haptic feedback in robotics-assisted minimally invasive surgical (RAMIS) systems. The research addresses several key issues associated with the incorporation of haptics in a master-slave (teleoperated) robotic environment for minimally invasive surgery (MIS). In this project, we designed a haptics-enabled dual-arm (two …

The Presence Of Regional Accents In Electrolarynx Speech And The Resultant Effect On Overall Intelligibility., Brian Madden, Eugene Coyle

Conference Papers

During voiced speech, the larynx provides quasi-periodic acoustic excitation of the vocal tract. In most electrolarynxes, mechanical vibrations are produced by a linear electromechanical actuator, the armature of which percusses against a metal or plastic plate at a frequency within the range of glottal excitation. In this paper, a phonological analysis of a section of results from an online perceptual intelligibility test was performed which compared speech produced using a novel hands-free electrolarynx and a commercially available electrolarynx. A portion of the test consisted of a closed-set format containing a selection of four sets of four random CVC audio samples …

Automatic Parameter Selection For Feature-Enhanced Radar Image Restoration, Moeness G Amin, Cher Hau Seng, Son Lam Phung, Abdesselam Bouzerdoum

Cher Hau Seng

In this paper, we propose a new technique for optimum parameter selection in non-quadratic radar image restoration. Although both the regularization hyper-parameter and the norm value are influential factors in the characteristics of the formed restoration, most existing optimization methods either require memory intensive computation or prior knowledge of the noise. Here, we present a contrast measure-based method for automated hyper-parameter selection. The proposed method is then extended to optimize the norm value used in non-quadratic image formation and restoration. The proposed method is evaluated on the MSTAR public target database and compared to the GCV method. Experimental results show …

The Measurement Of Internal Temperature Anomalies In The Body Using Microwave Radiometry And Anatomical Information: Inference Methods And Error Models, Tamara V. Sobers

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

The ability to observe temperature variations inside the human body may help in detecting the presence of medical anomalies. Abnormal changes in physiological parameters (such as metabolic and blood perfusion rates) cause localized tissue temperature change. If the anatomical information of an observed tissue region is known, then a nominal temperature profile can be created using the nominal physiological parameters. Temperature-varying radiation emitted from the human body can be captured using microwave radiometry and compared to the expected radiation from nominal temperature profiles to detect anomalies. Microwave radiometry is a passive system with the ability to capture radiation from tissue …

Terahertz Imaging For Cancer Detection, Benjamin A. St. Peter

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This project evaluates the ability of terahertz (THz) radiation to differentiate cancerous from non-cancerous human breast lumpectomy and mastectomy tissue. This is done by aiming a narrow-band THz beam at medical samples and measuring reflected power. THz images of specimens from Breast Conservation Surgery (BCS) were created using a gas laser source and mechanical scanning. The design and characterization of this system is discussed in detail. The images were correlated with optical histological micrographs of the same specimens and discrimination values of more than 70% were found for five of the six samples using Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis.

Magnetic Cell Separation By Inkjet Printing For Disease Monitoring, Sylvia Lucia Natividad

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The standard analysis technique for cell sorting, flow cytometry, requires centralized facilities such as tertiary Medical Centers. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Designated Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSA) Statistics, in this country alone, more than 35 million people live in medically underserved areas, many of which need access to diagnostic procedures for proper management of their diseases. A cell sorting technique that can be done in low-resource settings at a decreased cost to the medical organization and the patient has been developed through this research project. By combining inkjet printing technology and magnetic labeling of …

Determination Of The Dynamic Behavior Of Subjects With Diabetic Neuropathy, Luis G. Sagarnaga Lopez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The diabetic foot is one of the most feared complications of diabetes [3]. Causes of a diabetic foot come from many disorders including diabetic neuropathy, peripheral vascular disease, charcot's neuropathy, foot ulceration, and limb amputation [4]. Statistics have revealed that 8.3 percent of population in the U.S. is affected by diabetes in 2010, i.e., 25.8 million people. About 60 percent to 70 percent of people with diabetes have mild to severe forms of nervous system damage [13]. There is an enormous impact on the physical and mental health of patients who suffer from diabetes.

This research was to determine the …

Fusion Of Visual And Thermal Images Using Genetic Algorithms, Sertan Erkanli, Jiang Li, Ender Oguslu, Shangce Gao (Ed.)

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Procedural Wound Geometry And Blood Flow Generation For Medical Training Simulators, Rifat Aras, Yuzhong Shen, Jiang Li, David R. Holmes Iii (Ed.), Kenneth H. Wong (Ed.)

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Efficient application of wound treatment procedures is vital in both emergency room and battle zone scenes. In order to train first responders for such situations, physical casualty simulation kits, which are composed of tens of individual items, are commonly used. Similar to any other training scenarios, computer simulations can be effective means for wound treatment training purposes. For immersive and high fidelity virtual reality applications, realistic 3D models are key components. However, creation of such models is a labor intensive process. In this paper, we propose a procedural wound geometry generation technique that parameterizes key simulation inputs to establish the …

Oxidative Effects Of Nanosecond Pulsed Electric Field Exposure In Cells And Cell-Free Media, Olga N. Pakhomova, Vera A. Khorokhorina, Angela M. Bowman, Raminta Rodaitė-Riševičienė, Gintautas Saulis, Shu Xiao, Andrei G. Pakhomov

Bioelectrics Publications

Nanosecond pulsed electric field (nsPEF) is a novel modality for permeabilization of membranous structures and intracellular delivery of xenobiotics. We hypothesized that oxidative effects of nsPEF could be a separate primary mechanism responsible for bioeffects. ROS production in cultured cells and media exposed to 300-ns PEF (1–13 kV/cm) was assessed by oxidation of 2′, 7′-dichlorodihydrofluoresein (H₂DCF), dihidroethidium (DHE), or Amplex Red. When a suspension of H₂DCF-loaded cells was subjected to nsPEF, the yield of fluorescent 2′,7′dichlorofluorescein (DCF) increased proportionally to the pulse number and cell density. DCF emission increased with time after exposure in nsPEF-sensitive Jurkat …

Assessing The Therapeutic Effect Of 630 Nm Light-Emitting Diodes Irradiation On The Recovery Of Exercise-Induced Hand Muscle Fatigue With Surface Electromyogram, Dandan Yang, Xiaoying Wu, Wensheng Hou, Xiaolin Zheng, Jun Zheng, Yingtao Jiang

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

This paper aims to investigate the effect of light emitting diode therapy (LEDT) on exercise-induced hand muscle fatigue by measuring the surface electromyography (sEMG) of flexor digitorum superficialis. Ten healthy volunteers were randomly placed in the equal sized LEDT group and control group. All subjects performed a sustained fatiguing isometric contraction with the combination of four fingertips except thumb at 30% of maximal voluntary contraction (MVC) until exhaustion. The active LEDT or an identical passive rest therapy was then applied to flexor digitorum superficialis. Each subject was required to perform a re-fatigue task immediately after therapy which was the same …