Biomedical Commons^™

In Vitro And In Vivo Studies Of Mediator Kinase, Lili Wang

Theses and Dissertations

This project addresses the molecular and in vivo activities of transcriptionregulating module CKM, comprised of CDK8 (or CDK19) kinases, Cyclin C, MED12 and MED13. Our lab has found that CDK8/19 potentiates NFkB-induced transcription. In this study, we confirmed that both CDK8 and CDK19 regulate gene expression in kinasedependent manner. CDK8 and CDK19 are not required for NFkB-induced transcription, which also occurs in HEK293-dKO (CDK8 and CDK19 double knockout) cells, but such transcription becomes CDK8/19-dependent upon re-expression of CDK8 or CDK19 in dKO. Surprisingly. pre-treatment with a CDK8/19 inhibitor decreases the effect of CDK8/19 on NFkB-induced transcription.

In another set of …

Remote Healthcare Monitoring Using Wearable Iot Devices And Cloud Services, Mohammad Abdellatif, Menatalla Abdel-Gawad, Manar Usama, Haidy Hesham, Omar Ibrahim

Electrical Engineering

With the strain on healthcare infrastructure and healthcare workers due to the ongoing COVID'19 pandemic, the need for novel ways to simplify the interaction between patients and physicians has increased. The aim is mainly to reduce face-to-face interactions and free more time and resources for those who urgently need it. This paper presents a Telemedicine system which can be used as an alternative method to a doctor's visit. The proposed system is considered as an interface that remotely connects the patient and the doctor. The system regularly measures and uploads readings from the patient to a database which the doctor …

Verification Of A Digital Microfluidics Platform, Karanpartap Singh

Electrical Engineering

The electrowetting effect describes the change in contact angle between a solid surface and electrolyte in response to an applied electric potential difference. Given a planar array of individually-actuated electrodes, electrowetting can be used to transport, mix, and separate picoliter to microliter-sized droplets of liquid on a dielectric layer. Applications of this phenomenon range from lab-on-a-chip and other microfluidic devices to liquid lenses capable of altering their topology and focus within milliseconds.

This project extends prior work simulating the dependence of droplet velocity on actuation voltage and demonstrates observed physics on a physical platform. The simulation portion of this project …

Smart Motor Syringe System, Connor Wilson

Electrical Engineering

In this document a proof-of-concept design is developed and implementation to showcase the latest development in an ongoing effort to produce a series of automated syringe pumps.

Hsp90 Inhibitors Modulate Sars-Cov-2 Spike Protein Subunit 1-Induced Human Pulmonary Microvascular Endothelial Activation And Barrier Dysfunction, Ruben Manuel Luciano Colunga Biancatelli, Pavel Solopov, Betsy W. Gregory, Yara Khodour, John D. Catravas

Bioelectrics Publications

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) has caused more than 5 million deaths worldwide. Multiple reports indicate that the endothelium is involved during SARS-Cov-2-related disease (COVID-19). Indeed, COVID-19 patients display increased thrombophilia with arterial and venous embolism and lung microcapillary thrombotic disease as major determinants of deaths. The pathophysiology of endothelial dysfunction in COVID-19 is not completely understood. We have investigated the role of subunit 1 of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (S1SP) in eliciting endothelial barrier dysfunction, characterized dose and time relationships, and tested the hypothesis that heat shock protein 90 (HSP90) inhibitors would prevent and repair such injury. S1SP …

Integration Of Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy For Multichannel Cell Culture Measurement, Conard Chan

Master's Theses

ELECTROCHEMICAL IMPEDANCE SPECTROSCOPY (EIS) has been widely used to study the electrical properties of biological material due to its non-invasive nature and experimental reliability. However, most of the precision impedance analyzers used in EIS only provide single- or two-channel measurements which are inadequate for larger-scale multiplexed measurements, such as those found in modern microfluidic cell culture experiments. The Biomedical Microsystems Laboratory has developed a 16-channel cell culture platform with integrated electrode arrays for monitoring cell growth and electrical properties (i.e., the so-called “electrical phenotype”). In this paper, a system consisting of a 16-channel solid-state analog multiplexer (MUX)paired with a low-cost, …

Design And Fabrication Of A Low-Cost, Portable, Battery-Operated Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (Sers) Optical Device, Blessing Adewumi

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Raman Spectroscopy is a time-honored, non-invasive method for analyzing and identifying the molecular composition of materials. However, unenhanced Raman Spectroscopy has extremely low sensitivity which limits its sensing capability. SERS brings rough nano-metallic surfaces in contact with the material molecules to enormously enhance the Raman signals.

The sensitivity of SERS can be exploited in probe applications where the spectrometer needs to be brought near the specimen. For example, a long optical fiber coupled to a SERS device can be used to characterize and identify easy-to-reach cancerous tissues in organisms. Unfortunately, background signals in a long fiber can easily mask any …

Mos2 Based Memristive Synapses For Neuromorphic Computing, Adithi Pandrahal Krishnaprasad Sharada

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Brain inspired computing enabled by memristors have gained prominence over the years due to its nano-scale footprint, reduced complexity for implementing synapses and neurons. Several demonstrations show two-dimensional (2D) materials as a promising platform for realization of robust and energy-efficient memristive synapses. Ideally, a synapse should exhibit low cycle-to-cycle (C-C) and device-to-device (D-D) variability along with high maximum /minimum conductance (Gmax/Gmin) ratio, linearity and symmetry in weight update for obtaining high learning accuracy in neural networks (NNs). However, the demonstration of neuromorphic circuits using conventional materials systems has been limited by high C-C and D-D variability and non-linearity in the …

Development Of A Dual-Mode Cmos Microelectrode Array For The Simultaneous Study Of Electrochemical And Electrophysiological Activities Of The Brain, Geoffrey Mulberry

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Medical diagnostic devices are in high demand due to increasing cases of neurodegenerative diseases in the aging population and pandemic outbreaks in our increasingly connected global community. Devices capable of detecting the presence of a disease in its early stages can have dramatic impacts on how it can be treated or eliminated. High cost and limited accessibility to diagnostic tools are the main barriers preventing potential patients from receiving a timely disease diagnosis. This dissertation presents several devices that are aimed at providing higher quality medical diagnostics at a low cost. Brain function is commonly studied with systems detecting the …

The Design Of Cmos Front-End Amplifiers For Electrical Impedance Applications, Yueh-Ching Teng

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a medical imaging methodology that does not need any kind of ionizing radiation. It is significantly cheaper and smaller than Computerized Tomography (CT) or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). These advantages make EIT particularly suitable for emerging applications like the continuous medical imaging and telemonitoring of organ function. Current bench-top EIT systems are bulky and require shielded cables to interface with measurement electrodes. The cable introduces parasitic capacitances which shunt the desired signals and degrade the accuracy of the measurements. A EIT system based on application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) can reduce the parasitic and stray capacitance …

Radiomic Texture Feature Descriptor To Distinguish Recurrent Brain Tumor From Radiation Necrosis Using Multimodal Mri, M. S. Sadique, A. Temtam, E. Lappinen, K. M. Iftekharuddin

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Despite multimodal aggressive treatment with chemo-radiation-therapy, and surgical resection, Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM) may recur which is known as recurrent brain tumor (rBT), There are several instances where benign and malignant pathologies might appear very similar on radiographic imaging. One such illustration is radiation necrosis (RN) (a moderately benign impact of radiation treatment) which are visually almost indistinguishable from rBT on structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). There is hence a need for identification of reliable non-invasive quantitative measurements on routinely acquired brain MRI scans: pre-contrast T1-weighted (T1), post-contrast T1-weighted (T1Gd), T2-weighted (T2), and T2 Fluid Attenuated Inversion Recovery (FLAIR) that can …

Uncertainty Estimation In Classification Of Mgnt Using Radiogenomics For Glioblastoma Patients, W. Farzana, Z. A. Shboul, A. Temtam, K. M. Iftekharuddin

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM) is one of the most malignant brain tumors among all high-grade brain cancers. Temozolomide (TMZ) is the first-line chemotherapeutic regimen for glioblastoma patients. The methylation status of the O6-methylguanine-DNA-methyltransferase (MGMT) gene is a prognostic biomarker for tumor sensitivity to TMZ chemotherapy. However, the standardized procedure for assessing the methylation status of MGMT is an invasive surgical biopsy, and accuracy is susceptible to resection sample and heterogeneity of the tumor. Recently, radio-genomics which associates radiological image phenotype with genetic or molecular mutations has shown promise in the non-invasive assessment of radiotherapeutic treatment. This study proposes a machine-learning framework …

Qu-Brats: Miccai Brats 2020 Challenge On Quantifying Uncertainty In Brain Tumor Segmentation - Analysis Of Ranking Scores And Benchmarking Results, Raghav Mehta, Angelos Filos, Ujjwal Baid, Chiharu Sako, Richard Mckinley, Michael Rebsamen, Katrin Dätwyler, Raphael Meier, Piotr Radojewski, Gowtham Krishnan Murugesan, Sahil Nalawade, Chandan Ganesh, Ben Wagner, Fang F. Yu, Baowei Fei, Ananth J. Madhuranthakam, Joseph A. Maldjian, Laura Daza, Catalina Gómez, Pablo Arbeláez, Chengliang Dai, Shuo Wang, Hadrien Reynaud, Yuan-Han Mo, Elsa Angelini, Yike Guo, Wenjia Bai, Subhashis Banerjee, Lin-Min Pei, Murat Ak, Sarahi Rosas-González, Ilyess Zemmoura, Clovis Tauber, Minh H. Vu, Tufve Nyholm, Tommy Löfstedt, Laura Mora Ballestar, Veronica Vilaplana, Hugh Mchugh, Gonzalo Maso Talou, Alan Wang, Jay Patel, Ken Chang, Katharina Hoebel, Mishka Gidwani, Nishanth Arun, Sharut Gupta, Mehak Aggarwal, Praveer Singh, Elizabeth R. Gerstner, Jayashree Kalpathy-Cramer, Nicholas Boutry, Alexis Huard, Lasitha Vidyaratne, Md. Monibor Rahman, Khan M. Iftekharuddin, Joseph Chazalon, Elodie Puybareau, Guillaume Tochon, Jun Ma, Mariano Cabezas, Xavier Llado, Arnau Oliver, Liliana Valencia, Sergi Valverde, Mehdi Amian, Mohammadreza Soltaninejad, Andriy Myronenko, Ali Hatamizadeh, Xue Feng, Quan Dou, Nicholas Tustison, Craig Meyer, Nisarg A. Shah, Sanjay Talbar, Marc-André Weber, Abhishek Mahajan, Andras Jakab, Roland Wiest, Hassan M. Fathallah-Shaykh, Arash Nazeri, Mikhail Milchenko1, Daniel Marcus, Aikaterini Kotrotsou, Rivka Colen, John Freymann, Justin Kirby, Christos Davatzikos, Bjoern Menze, Spyridon Bakas, Yarin Gal, Tal Arbel

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Deep learning (DL) models have provided the state-of-the-art performance in a wide variety of medical imaging benchmarking challenges, including the Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) challenges. However, the task of focal pathology multi-compartment segmentation (e.g., tumor and lesion sub-regions) is particularly challenging, and potential errors hinder the translation of DL models into clinical workflows. Quantifying the reliability of DL model predictions in the form of uncertainties, could enable clinical review of the most uncertain regions, thereby building trust and paving the way towards clinical translation. Recently, a number of uncertainty estimation methods have been introduced for DL medical image segmentation tasks. …

Speaker Encoding For Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis, Tristin W. Cory

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Spoken communication, for many, is an essential part of everyday life. Some individuals can lose or not be born with the ability to speak. To function on a day-to-day basis, these individuals find other ways of communication. Adaptive speech synthesis is one of those ways. It recreates a user’s previous voice or creates a voice that blends with their regional dialect. Current adaptive speech synthesis techniques that achieve human-like speech require thirty minutes, to a few hours of high-quality audio recordings of a target speaker. This amount of recorded audio is not commonly possessed by people in need of a …