Acute Stent-Induced Endothelial Denudation: Biomechanical Predictors of Vascular Injury.

Recent concern for local drug delivery and withdrawal of the first Food and Drug Administration-approved bioresorbable scaffold emphasizes the need to optimize the relationships between stent design and drug release with imposed arterial injury and observed pharmacodynamics. In this study, we examine the hypothesis that vascular injury is predictable from stent design and that the expanding force of stent deployment results in increased circumferential stress in the arterial tissue, which may explain acute injury poststent deployment. Using both numerical simulations and experiments on three different stent designs (slotted tube, corrugated ring, and delta wing), arterial injury due to device deployment was examined.

TickBot: a novel robotic device for controlling tick populations in the natural environment.

A semi-autonomous 4-wheeled robot (TickBot) was fitted with a denim cloth treated with an acaricide (permethrin™) and tested for its ability to control ticks in a tick-infested natural environment in Portsmouth, Virginia. The robot's sensors detect a magnetic field signal from a guide wire encased in 80m polyethylene tubing, enabling the robot to follow the trails, open areas and other terrain where the tubing was located. To attract ticks to the treated area, CO2 was distributed through the same tubing, fitted with evenly spaced pores and flow control valves, which permitted uniform CO2 distribution.

Cellular electrical micro-impedance parameter artifacts produced by passive and active current regulation.

This study analyzes the cellular microelectrode voltage measurement errors produced by active and passive current regulation, and the propagation of these errors into cellular barrier function parameter estimates. The propagation of random and systematic errors into these parameters is accounted for within a Riemannian manifold framework consistent with information geometry. As a result, the full non-linearity of the model parameter state dependence, the instrumental noise distribution, and the systematic errors associated with the voltage to impedance conversion, are accounted for.

Endothelial cell electrical impedance parameter artifacts produced by a gold electrode and phase sensitive detection.

Frequency dependent cellular micro-impedance estimates obtained from a gold two-electrode configuration using phase sensitive detection have become increasingly used to evaluate cellular barrier model parameters. The results of this study show that cellular barrier function parameter estimates optimized using measurements obtained from this biosensor are highly susceptible to both time dependent and systematic instrumental artifacts. Based on a power spectral analysis of experimentally measured microelectrode voltages, synchronous, 60 Hz, and white Gaussian noise were identified as the most significant time dependent instrumental artifacts.