This work presents a modular approach to the development of strain sensors for large deformations... more This work presents a modular approach to the development of strain sensors for large deformations. The proposed method separates the extension and signal transduction mechanisms using a soft, elastomeric transmission and a high-sensitivity microelectromechanical system (MEMS) transducer. By separating the transmission and transduction, they can be optimized independently for application-specific mechanical and electrical performance. This work investigates the potential of this approach for human health monitoring as an implantable cardiac strain sensor for measuring global longitudinal strain (GLS). The durability of the sensor was evaluated by conducting cyclic loading tests over one million cycles, and the results showed negligible drift. To account for hysteresis and frequency-dependent effects, a lumped-parameter model was developed to represent the viscoelastic behavior of the sensor. Multiple model orders were considered and compared using validation and test data sets that m...
Selectively Compliant Annuloplasty Ring to Enable Annular Dynamics in Mitral Valve Repair Evaluated by In-Vitro Stereovision
Mitral valve (MV) annular dynamics are critical to the long term efficacy of MV repair. Today’s a... more Mitral valve (MV) annular dynamics are critical to the long term efficacy of MV repair. Today’s annuloplasty rings, used to restore MV function, impose significant constraints on the motion profile of the MV annulus. We present a selectively compliant ring that provides sufficient stiffness to stabilize a diseased annulus while allowing physiological annular dynamics. Ring design is informed by a finite element analysis and experimentally evaluated with in-vitro stereophotogrammetry. We compare the ring dynamics to commercially available semi-rigid rings as well as values found in literature for healthy annuli. The results demonstrate that motion of the selectively compliant ring is significantly closer to that of a healthy annulus based on standard metrics that define MV annular movement. Specifically, the metrics for the new ring compare to those in literature as follows: change in orifice area 12.5 ± 3% vs.10 ± 2%; change in anterior-posterior diam. 5.4 ± 0.3% vs. 7 ± 1%; change ...
Whole-cell patch-clamp recording in vivo is the gold-standard method for measuring subthreshold e... more Whole-cell patch-clamp recording in vivo is the gold-standard method for measuring subthreshold electrophysiology from single cells during behavioural tasks, sensory stimulations, and optogenetic manipulation. However, these recordings require a tight, gigaohm resistance, seal between a glass pipette electrode's aperture and a cell's membrane. These seals are difficult to form, especially in vivo, in part because of a strong dependence on the distance between the pipette aperture and cell membrane. We elucidate and utilize this dependency to develop an autonomous .
Despite numerous research efforts, the precise mechanisms of concussion have yet to be fully unco... more Despite numerous research efforts, the precise mechanisms of concussion have yet to be fully uncovered. Clinical studies on high-risk populations, such as contact sports athletes, have become more common and give insight on the link between impact severity and brain injury risk through the use of wearable sensors and neurological testing. However, as the number of institutions operating these studies grows, there is a growing need for a platform to share these data to facilitate our understanding of concussion mechanisms and aid in the development of suitable diagnostic tools. To that end, this paper puts forth two contributions: (1) a centralized, open-access platform for storing and sharing head impact data, in collaboration with the Federal Interagency Traumatic Brain Injury Research informatics system (FITBIR), and (2) a deep learning impact detection algorithm (MiGNet) to differentiate between true head impacts and false positives for the previously biomechanically validated in...
1.1.1Whole-cell patch-clamp recordingin vivois the gold-standard method for measuring subthreshol... more 1.1.1Whole-cell patch-clamp recordingin vivois the gold-standard method for measuring subthreshold electrophysiology from single cells during behavioural tasks, sensory stimulations, and optogenetic manipulation. However, these recordings require a tight, gigaohm resistance, seal between a glass pipette electrode’s aperture and a cell’s membrane. These seals are difficult to form, especially in vivo, in part because of a strong dependence on the distance between the pipette aperture and cell membrane. We elucidate and utilize this dependency to develop an autonomous method for placement and synchronization of pipette’s tip aperture to the membrane of a nearby, moving neuron, which enables high-yield seal formation and subsequent recordings in the deep in the brain of the living mouse, in the thalamus. This synchronization procedure nearly doubles the reported gigaseal yield in the thalamus (>3 mm below the pial surface) from 26% (n=17/64) to 48% (n=32/66). Whole-cell recording yi...
While the rate-distortion optimized quantization (RDOQ) technique provides nontrivial coding gain... more While the rate-distortion optimized quantization (RDOQ) technique provides nontrivial coding gain in High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), it also involves considerable computations, whereby the complexity of quantization is significantly increased. In this paper, two schemes (the RDOQ bypass decision and the simplified level adjustment) are investigated to reduce the complexity of the quantization process in HEVC with RDOQ. The RDOQ bypass decision method initially selects the transform blocks for which the RDOQ is expected to give less/or no coding gain and enables the conventional uniform scalar quantization to be applied to these transform blocks instead of the RDOQ. The simplified level adjustment method only estimates the difference in rate-distortion costs among the candidate quantization levels to enable the encoder to select an optimal quantization level at a much reduced computational cost. Furthermore, the proposed simplified level adjustment scheme is designed so that it can be implemented in lookup tables. Experimental results show that the proposed fast method achieves 14.3% quantization complexity reduction in all intra main conditions, 15.2% in the random access main condition, and 14.9% in the low delay main condition on average with virtually no coding loss compared with the conventional quantization process with the RDOQ.
Mitral valve (MV) annular dynamics are critical to the long term efficacy of MV repair. Today's a... more Mitral valve (MV) annular dynamics are critical to the long term efficacy of MV repair. Today's annuloplasty rings, used to restore MV function, impose significant constraints on the motion profile of the MV annulus. We present a selectively compliant ring that provides sufficient stiffness to stabilize a diseased annulus while allowing physiological annular dynamics. Ring design is informed by a finite element analysis and experimentally evaluated with in-vitro stereophotogrammetry. We compare the ring dynamics to commercially available semi-rigid rings and demonstrate improved performance with a significant difference (p< 0.001) in standard metrics that define MV annulus motion. Furthermore, the metrics for the selectively compliant ring approximate those in the literature for healthy annuli: change in orifice area 12.5 ± 3% vs. 10 ± 2%; change in anterior-posterior diam. 5.4 ± 0.3% vs. 5 ± 1%; change in inter-commissural diam. 6.6 ± 1.3% vs. 7 ± 1%. 1
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