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DEVELOPMENT OF A PREDICIlVE FRAMEWORK TO FORECAST VENOUS STENOSIS
Title
DEVELOPMENT OF A PREDICIlVE FRAMEWORK TO FORECAST VENOUS STENOSIS
Creator
Mahmoudzadeh Akherat, S.m. Javid
Date
2016, 2016-12
Description
The end stage renal disease (ESRD) patient population is growing at a troubling rate, calling for a focused attention to investigate the...
Show moreThe end stage renal disease (ESRD) patient population is growing at a troubling rate, calling for a focused attention to investigate the chronic kidney diseases, their characteristics and our lines of defense against them. One major medical treatment for ESRD patients is hemodialysis which is facilitated through vascular access (VA). The vascular access of particular interest in this investigation as well as the medical community is the brachiocephalic fistula (BCF), which is a form of arteriovenous fistula (AVF), created surgically by connecting the brachial artery and the cephalic vein. It is commonly used for elderly patients and for those with poor circulation systems, e.g. diabetics. The extreme hemodynamic environment that BCF creates triggers the onset of neointimal hyperplasia (NH) in most of these patients which leads to access failure and a high morbidity and mortality rate. This process happens in a matter of months, providing an excellent translational medicine experimental stage to observe as the vessel walls react and adapt to the new hemodynamically violent conditions. Through extensive analysis of the venous deformation and subsequent hemodynamics of a patient cohort of 160, a prognosticative framework to predict the vein deformation in these patients prior to the occurrence of the failure has been developed. The obtained results are the consequence of the integration of clinical practice and computational science. The proposed method was first based on our hypothesis which roots the NH in non-physiological wall shear stresses (WSS), and was then improved and modified using rigorous optimization and numerical approaches. This finding is essential to the modification of the current VA techniques to increase the patency of the AVFs, to prevent the diminishing functionality of the access, and to increase the life expectancy of ESRD patients. Moreover, this finding will further assist us in comprehension of the human vasculature growth and remodeling (G&R) through bypassing the analysis of unknown biological phenomena, as it is achieved purely by juxtaposing well-defined mathematical, physical, and medical concepts.
Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, December 2016
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Double Jeopardy: Womersley, McDonald, and WADC TR 56-614
Title
Double Jeopardy: Womersley, McDonald, and WADC TR 56-614
Creator
Ahrens, Aric G.
Date
2016-05-17
Description
An Air Force technical report, known by two titles and closeted from public view not once but twice, was freed of restrictions via Freedom of...
Show moreAn Air Force technical report, known by two titles and closeted from public view not once but twice, was freed of restrictions via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the staff of the Paul V. Galvin Library in 2015. This allowed the report to be scanned and posted online as part of Galvin's Contrails digital initiative. This presentation follows the history of the report and its importance in the field of hemodynamics. The report has been cited under one title at least 200 times, and under the other title at least 100 times, and continues to be cited under both titles to the present day. Theories are presented that explain the emergence of the two varying titles, the role of government restrictions on public availability of the report played in the continued inconsistency of citations, and the variation of the patterns of citations based on the type of publications in which the report was cited. In summation, this presentation will provide an anecdotal example of the damage inflicted on scientific research by arbitrary government restrictions on the availability of taxpayer funded research, illustrating the value of the successful FOIA request.
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Collection
Celebrating Our Successes Mini-Conference 2016