Biomedical Commons^™

Reducing Food Scarcity: The Benefits Of Urban Farming, S.A. Claudell, Emilio Mejia

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

Urban farming can enhance the lives of communities and help reduce food scarcity. This paper presents a conceptual prototype of an efficient urban farming community that can be scaled for a single apartment building or an entire community across all global geoeconomics regions, including densely populated cities and rural, developing towns and communities. When deployed in coordination with smart crop choices, local farm support, and efficient transportation then the result isn’t just sustainability, but also increasing fresh produce accessibility, optimizing nutritional value, eliminating the use of ‘forever chemicals’, reducing transportation costs, and fostering global environmental benefits.

Imagine Doris, who is …

Design, Fabrication And Characterization Of Zero Power Sensor/Harvester For Smart Grid Applications, Zeynel Guler

Mechanical Engineering ETDs

This study presents a flexible sensor/harvester device to be used in both electromagnetic sensing and energy harvesting applications for smart grids. When a current passes through a wire, the sensor detects the magnetic field created by that current. The sensor magnet interacts with the wire magnetic field resulting in a transfer of energy through the piezoelectric cantilever. Piezoelectric, conductive, magnetic, and magnetostrictive composite thin films were prepared to fabricate this device.

Initially, the magnet of the cantilever was optimized considering its shape, thickness, length, taper angle etc. via both simulations and experiments. Peak to peak voltage versus cantilever position graph …

An Investigation Of Match For Lossless Video Compression, Brittany Sullivan-Reicks

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A new lossless video compression technique, Match, is investigated. Match uses the similarity between the frames of a video or the slices of medical images to find a prediction for the current pixel. A portion of the previous frame is searched to find a matching context, which is the pixels surrounding the current pixel, within some distance centered on the current location. The best distance to use for each dataset is found experimentally. The matching context refers to the neighborhood of w, nw, n, and ne, where the pixel in the previous frame with the closest matching context becomes the …

Development Of A 3d Printed Conductive Biopolymer For Cardiac Tissue Engineering, Britanny Lizeth Stark

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death in the US, with approximately 859,000 deaths each year. The major contributor to CVD is Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI), which causes the death of approximately 25% of the cardiomyocytes present in the left ventricle of the heart. After AMI, the adult human heart has a very limited regenerative capacity. Moreover, the electrical propagation of the myocardium is severely disrupted, making the heart more susceptible to failure and patient death. However, current pharmacological treatments do not address the loss of cardiomyocytes and the disruption of electrical propagation in the heart. Tissue engineering …

Adaptive Personalized Drug Delivery Method For Warfarin And Anemia Management: Modeling And Control., Affan Affan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Personalized precision medicine aims to develop the appropriate treatments for suitable patients at the right time to obtain optimal results. Personalized medicine is challenging due to inter- and intra-patient variability, narrow therapeutic window, the effect of other medications, comorbidity (more than one disease at a time), nonlinear patient dynamics, and time-varying patient dose response characteristics which include bleeding (internal and external). This research aims to develop a framework for an adaptive personalized modeling and control method with minimum clinical patient specific dose response data for optimal drug dosing. The proposed methodology is applied to anemia and warfarin management. It is …

Controlled Radiation Capsule For Precision And Rapid Cancer Treatment, Hoseon Lee, Zsolt Kollar, Bailey R. White, Junia Nguyen, David Roque, Sowjanya Palagani

Symposium of Student Scholars

This research aims to transform cancer treatment through the optimization of brachytherapy, with a focus on reducing treatment duration, setup complexities, and financial burdens, all while emphasizing patient safety. Patients living at a distance from radiation clinics, particularly those undergoing extended Low Dose Radiation brachytherapy, often struggle with the formidable financial challenges associated with securing nearby accommodations. In response to these issues, the research introduces a radiation capsule designed to condense the conventional six-month treatment period to approximately just one week, thereby significantly reducing the duration of required accommodations. This capsule is especially relevant considering the construction cost of $40 …

Improving Cellphone-Based Bio-Imaging Technique For Fluorescence Detection, Erteza T. Efaz

LSU Master's Theses

The research presented in this thesis focuses on the design, development, and evaluation of a fluorescence detection system. The system is implemented primarily as an Android application, Auto Camera, which leverages smartphone cameras to capture and analyze fluorescent images. The application provides a user-friendly interface with some configurable features like exposure time, ISO speed, and storage limit; as well as defining detection thresholds and setting acquisition intervals. This study begins with the architectural framework of the Android application, which is written in Java using Android Studio. The API compatibility is set to version 33, and users are prompted to grant …

Hierarchical Based Classifcation Method Based On Fusion Ofgaussian Map Descriptors Foralzheimer Diagnosis Using T1‑Weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Nourhan Zayed, Shereen E. Morsy, Inas A. Yassine

Mechanical Engineering

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is considered one of the most spouting elderly diseases. In 2015, AD is reported the US’s sixth cause of death. Substantially, non-invasive imaging is widely employed to provide biomarkers supporting AD screening, diagnosis, and progression. In this study, Gaussian descriptors-based features are proposed to be efcient new biomarkers using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) T1-weighted images to diferentiate between Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), and Normal controls (NC). Several Gaussian map-based features are extracted such as Gaussian shape operator, Gaussian curvature, and mean curvature. The aforementioned features are then introduced to the Support Vector Machine (SVM). …

Vertical Federated Learning Using Autoencoders With Applications In Electrocardiograms, Wesley William Chorney

Theses and Dissertations

Federated learning is a framework in machine learning that allows for training a model while maintaining data privacy. Moreover, it allows clients with their own data to collaborate in order to build a stronger, shared model. Federated learning is of particular interest to healthcare data, since it is of the utmost importance to respect patient privacy while still building useful diagnostic tools. However, healthcare data can be complicated — data format might differ across providers, leading to unexpected inputs and incompatibility between different providers. For example, electrocardiograms might differ in sampling rate or number of leads used, meaning that a …

Integration Of Biomedical Engineering And Computer Vision For Morphological Alteration Identification In Diabetic Cardiomyopathy: An Analysis And Evaluation Stra Tegy, Monica Delgado

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Diabetic cardiomyopathy (DCM) is a type of heart disease that affects people with diabetes. It is characterized by changes in the structure and function of the heart, including thickening and stiffening of the heart muscle, impaired relaxation of the heart, and reduced pumping function. DCM is considered an ailment of the heart muscle and an increased risk factor in people with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Although the exact mechanisms behind DCM are not fully understood, high blood glucose levels are known to contribute to the development and progression of the disease.While many options to manage and diagnose DCM have …

Towards Reliable Hepatocytic Anatomy Segmentation In Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy Using U-Net With Auto-Encoder, Koloud Najem Alkhamaiseh

Dissertations

Despite the advantages of minimally invasive surgeries that depend heavily on vision, the indirect access and lack of the 3D field of view of the area of interest introduce some complications in the desired procedures. Fortunately, the recorded videos from these procedures offer the opportunity for intra-operative and post-operative analyses, to improve future performance and safety.

Deep learning models for surgical video analysis could therefore support visual tasks such as identifying the critical view of safety (CVS) in laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC), potentially contributing to the reduction of the current rates of bile duct injuries in LC. Most bile duct injuries …

Auto-Segmentation In Pancreatic And Liver Radiation Therapy, Cenji Yu

Dissertations and Theses (Open Access)

Background

Gastrointestinal cancers exhibit a high mortality rate compared to other cancer types. Among these, pancreatic cancer ranks as the fourth leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. The five-year survival rate remains alarmingly low at a mere 9%. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), another aggressive form of cancer, is rapidly becoming the primary cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States. The treatment of both liver cancer and pancreatic cancer heavily relies on a multidisciplinary approach. Innovative treatment strategies involving dose-escalated regimens, such as stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT), are emerging as an important pillar of the management of liver and pancreatic …

Augmented Human Inspired Phase Variable Using A Canonical Dynamical System, Timothy Driscoll

All Theses

Accurately parameterizing human gait is highly important in the continued development of assistive robotics, including but not limited to lower limb prostheses and exoskeletons. Previous studies introduce the idea of time-invariant real-time gait parameterization via human-inspired phase variables. The phase represents the location or percent of the gait cycle the user has progressed through. This thesis proposes an alternative approach for determining the gait phase leveraging previous methods and a canonical dynamical system.

Human subject experiments demonstrate the ability to accurately produce a phase variable corresponding to the human gait progression for various walking configurations. Configurations include changes in incline …

Accurate Orientation Control Of Tendon Driven Continuum Robots That Exhibit Elasticity, Manu Srivastava

All Dissertations

This dissertation makes new contributions to the modeling and implementation of Tendon Driven Continuum Robots (TDCRs). Specifically, motivated by 3D printing of concrete using a continuum hose robot in construction applications, we focus on TDCRs featuring compliance in the robot backbone and actuating tendons, e.g. surgical robots/endoscopes/catheters with tendon actuation. We expand previous mechanics-based models to show how and why such compliance significantly restricts performance when traditional kinematics-based planning and control techniques are applied.

The main contribution of this work is a new Elasticity Compensation(EC) model that explains why the ad hoc approach of preloading/pretensioning the tendons compensates for compliance …

Using Machine Learning To Assist Auditory Processing Evaluation, Hasitha Wimalarathna, Sangamanatha Veeranna, Minh Vu Duong, Chris Allan Prof, Sumit K. Agrawal, Prudence Allen, Jagath Samarabandu, Hanif M. Ladak

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Introduction: Approximately 0.2–5% of school-age children complain of listening difficulties in the absence of hearing loss. These children are often referred to an audiologist for an auditory processing disorder (APD) assessment. Adequate experience and training is necessary to arrive at an accurate diagnosis due to the heterogeneity of the disorder.

Objectives: The main goal of the study was to determine if machine learning (ML) can be used to analyze data from the APD clinical test battery to accurately categorize children with suspected APD into clinical sub-groups, similar to expert labels.

Methods: The study retrospectively collected data from 134 children referred …

An Enhanced Adaptive Learning System Based On Microservice Architecture, Abdelsalam Helmy Ibrahim, Mohamed Eliemy, Aliaa Abdelhalim Youssif

Future Computing and Informatics Journal

This study aims to enhance Adaptive Learning Systems (ALS) in Petroleum Sector in Egypt by using the Microservice Architecture and measure the impact of enhancing ALS by participating ALS users through a statistical study and questionnaire directed to them if they accept to apply the Cloud Computing Service “Microservices” to enhance the ALS performance, quality and cost value or not. The study also aims to confirm that there is a statistically significant relationship between ALS and Cloud Computing Service “Microservices” and prove the impact of enhancing the ALS by using Microservices in the cloud in Adaptive Learning in the Egyptian …

Visual Question Answering: A Survey, Gehad Assem El-Naggar

Future Computing and Informatics Journal

Visual Question Answering (VQA) has been an emerging field in computer vision and natural language processing that aims to enable machines to understand the content of images and answer natural language questions about them. Recently, there has been increasing interest in integrating Semantic Web technologies into VQA systems to enhance their performance and scalability. In this context, knowledge graphs, which represent structured knowledge in the form of entities and their relationships, have shown great potential in providing rich semantic information for VQA. This paper provides an abstract overview of the state-of-the-art research on VQA using Semantic Web technologies, including knowledge …

Characterization And Estimation Of Musculoskeletal Pain Using Machine Learning, Boluwatife Faremi

Master's Theses

Traditional scales utilized for recording pain are known to be highly subjective and biased due to inaccuracies in recollecting actual pain intensities. As a result, machine learning (ML) models that are trained using these scores as ground truth are reported to have low performance for objective pain classification because of the huge disparity between what was felt in moments of pain and the scores recorded afterward.

In the present study, two devices were designed for gathering real-time, continuous in-session subjective pain scores and the recording of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) altered endodermal (EDA) activity. 24 participants were recruited to …

Cardio Trainer, Levi Rash, Cristian Rodriguez

Electrical Engineering

The Cardio Trainer Device is a wearable device that guides the user through a physical exercise based on the user’s heartbeat measurements. Users interface with the device via a wearable band. The band determines the heartbeat of the user in real time and, using that reading, gives the user verbal instructions to optimize their workout. These verbal instructions then serve to control the physical exertion of the user and are delivered through an audio device. Users input personal physical metrics to the Cardio Trainer Device that tailor the performance of the device in a manner of ways: rate of instruction, …

Novel Approach For Non-Invasive Prediction Of Body Shape And Habitus, Emma Young

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While marker-based motion capture remains the gold standard in measuring human movement, accuracy is influenced by soft-tissue artifacts, particularly for subjects with high body mass index (BMI) where markers are not placed close to the underlying bone. Obesity influences joint loads and motion patterns, and BMI may not be sufficient to capture the distribution of a subject’s weight or to differentiate differences between subjects. Subjects in need of a joint replacement are more likely to have mobility issues or pain, which prevents exercise. Obesity also increases the likelihood of needing a total joint replacement. Accurate movement data for subjects with …

Piezoelectric And Conductive Polymer Based Flexible Devices Enabling Cardiovascular Health Sensing And Energy Harvesting, Andrew Closson

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Piezoelectric materials show great promise for low-power wearable and implantable sensing, but their rigidity makes it challenging to integrate them with biological tissue. To address this, researchers have started exploring polymer-based functional materials that offer flexibility and are suitable for interfacing with the human body. However, these materials are still in their early stages, and a framework is necessary to illustrate how these materials, in conjunction with novel fabrication techniques and device designs, can enable the development of multi-functional sensing and energy harvesting devices.

This thesis utilizes highly scalable fabrication methods for functional polymers to build and test a flexible …

Approximate And Sample Entropy Of Center Of Pressure In Unperturbed Tandem Standing: Contribution Of Embedding Dimension And Tolerance, Jayla Mashae Wesley

Masters Theses

Approximate entropy (ApEn) and sample entropy (SampEn) are statistical methods designed to quantify the regularity or predictability of a time series. Although ApEn has been a prominent choice for use, it is currently unclear as to which method and parameter selection combination is optimal for its application in biomechanics. The goal of this thesis was to examine the difference between ApEn and SampEn related to center of pressure (COP) data during standing balance tasks, while also refining tolerance r, to determine entropy optimization. Six participants completed five 30-second, feet together and tandem standing, trials under eyes-open and eyes-closed conditions. Ground …

Dense & Attention Convolutional Neural Networks For Toe Walking Recognition, Junde Chen, Rahul Soangra, Marybeth Grant-Beuttler, Y. A. Nanehkaran, Yuxin Wen

Physical Therapy Faculty Articles and Research

Idiopathic toe walking (ITW) is a gait disorder where children’s initial contacts show limited or no heel touch during the gait cycle. Toe walking can lead to poor balance, increased risk of falling or tripping, leg pain, and stunted growth in children. Early detection and identification can facilitate targeted interventions for children diagnosed with ITW. This study proposes a new one-dimensional (1D) Dense & Attention convolutional network architecture, which is termed as the DANet, to detect idiopathic toe walking. The dense block is integrated into the network to maximize information transfer and avoid missed features. Further, the attention modules are …

Development Of A Cost-Constrained Intelligent Prosthetic Knee With Real-Time Machine Learning, Predictive Stumble Control, Lucas Jonathan Galey

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The field of biomechatronics is evolving quickly with advances in computer science, biology, and electrical and mechanical engineering. Coupled with increased interests in machine learning (ML) across all industry sectors, there are opportunities to leverage advanced analytics in uniquely complex problems. This study aimed to deploy real-time ML predictions in a novel microprocessor-controlled prosthetic knee (MPK) device capable of identifying and responding to stumble-events to reduce amputee fall prevalence. Innately, stumbling is a chaotic event. Current MPKs operate by detecting gait characteristics and reacting to preprogrammed states. While these systems are beneficial in significant ways, such as energy expenditure and …

Development Of Medical Device For Volume Status Assessment Using Peripheral Venous Pressure, Audra Beneux

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The severe side effects of acute dehydration and blood loss may be prevented if assessed and treated quickly. As amplifier technology has improved, small peripheral venous pressure (PVP) signals collected using a transducer on an intravenous catheter can be analyzed to monitor patient volume status. This thesis details the development of an embedded system prototype that quickly and accurately assesses volume status using PVP analysis. The volume prediction algorithm classified 10 seconds of PVP data as “dehydrated” or “resuscitated”. The hardware design consisted of four primary areas: analog signal conditioning, processing, user interaction, and power. After data collection, the signal …

Portable Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy For Non-Invasive And Quantitative Assessment Of The Parathyroid Glands Viability During Surgery, Mark Romine, Linh Luong, Alex Moazzen, Katie Cho, Paul Lee

Symposium of Student Scholars

Portable Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy for Non-invasive and Quantitative Assessment of the Parathyroid Glands Viability During Surgery

Mark Romine, Linh Luong, Alex Moazzen, Katie Cho and Paul Lee

The parathyroid glands (PTGs) are responsible for the regulation of calcium levels in the blood by secreting a parathyroid hormone. This parathyroid hormone then regulates the body’s absorption, storage, and secretion of calcium, which can directly affect the way muscles and nerves operate. PTGs are often at risk of damage, or accidental removal during thyroid surgeries, because it is challenging to identify PTGs and to determine their viability. Current methods of visual inspections …

Wireless, Handheld Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy To Quantify Tissue Microvascular Hemodynamics, Linh Luong, Alex Moazzen, Mark Romine, Katie Cho, Paul Lee

Symposium of Student Scholars

Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy (DRS) is a non-invasive optical method to characterize tissue optical properties for disease diagnosis and health monitoring. Two optical fibers are often used in a DRS system: one to deliver light to the tissue and the other to gather diffuse reflectance spectra, which provide quantitative details about the structure and composition of the tissue. The conventional DRS system, however, is expensive, bulky, and composed of fragile optical fibers and multiple electrical connections. Here we propose to build a wireless, handheld, and fiber-less diffuse optical spectroscopy system. Unfortunately, the diffusion approximation utilized for data analysis of the conventional …

Computational Design Of Fiber-Optic Probes For Biosensing, Suwarna Karna

Electrical Engineering Theses

This thesis presents a study on the optical characteristics of hollow-core photonic crystal fibers (HC-PCFs) with a band gap cladding structure and their applications in optical fiber sensing. This 800B HC-PCF exhibited excellent optical properties and has a flexible structure, which makes them suitable for a wide range of industrial applications. Finite element simulations and structural optimization designs were conducted using the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) technique to determine the optimal performance parameters of the 800B HC-PCF. The fiber was further modified using the SPR technique to improve its practical detection capabilities. The performance of the modified fiber was observed …

Split And Join: An Efficient Approach For Simulating Stapled Intestinal Anastomosis In Virtual Reality, Di Qi, Suvranu De

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

Colorectal cancer is a life-threatening disease. It is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States. Stapled anastomosis is a rapid treatment for colorectal cancer and other intestinal diseases and has become an integral part of routine surgical practice. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no existing work simulating intestinal anastomosis that often involves sophisticated soft tissue manipulations such as cutting and stitching. In this paper, for the first time, we propose a novel split and join approach to simulate a side-to-side stapled intestinal anastomosis in virtual reality. We mimic the intestine model using …

An Optimized Deep Learning-Based Framework For Predicting Diabetes Mellitus Using Ffnn, Norhan S. Elmongy, Sally M. Elghamrawy, Amr M. T. Ali-Eldin, Ali I. Eldesouky

Mansoura Engineering Journal

Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a major public health problem in Egypt, and the illness is regarded as a contemporary epidemic across the world. Diabetes is becoming more common, which is a cause for serious concern. As a result, precise and timely identification of the illness is critical. Health and research institutions have also recently expressed a serious interest in developing and implementing cutting-edge healthcare systems. Therefore, it is necessary to accurately and quickly identify the condition. To solve this issue, scientific research has been carried out, but the outcomes have fallen short. Four layers make up the proposed Diabetes mellitus …