Sharif Digital Repository

Background Iatrogenic injuries to paraspinal muscles during posterior lumbar surgery cause a reduction in their contractile cross-sectional area and thus presumably their postoperative activation. This study investigates the effect of such intraoperative injuries on postoperative patterns of muscle activations and spinal loads during various activities using a combined modeling and in vivo MR imaging approach. Methods A three-dimensional, multi-joint, musculoskeletal model was used to estimate pre- and postoperative muscle forces and spinal loads under various activities in upright and flexed postures. According to our in vivo pre- and postoperative (∼ 6 months) measurements in six patients... 

Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) is a common musculoskeletal disorder resulting in altered gait patterns. Uncontrolled manifold (UCM) analysis has been demonstrated as a useful approach for quantitative analysis of motor variability and synergies. The present study aimed to investigate the changes in the kinematic synergy, controlling the center of mass (COM) position while walking on normal and narrow paths in people with KOA compared to asymptomatic participants. In this cross-sectional study, twenty people with mild to moderate KOA and twenty asymptomatic individuals walked at their comfortable preferred speed across normal and narrow paths on a treadmill. The UCM analysis was performed... 

Surface registration is a necessary step and widely used in medical image-aided surgery. It's relevance to medical imaging is that there is much useful anatomical information in the form of collected surface points which originate from complimentary modalities. In this study, the kinematic relations between two point clouds with different coordinate definitions have been generated. Using Influence Method of surface modeling for extracting point clouds functions, the transformation matrix would be resulted. The proposed method was applied for an experimental femur data points(651 points) using the MRI images. These data points were transformed in a 30 degrees flexion of knee. This... 

Manual material handling (MMH) is considered as one of the main contributors to low back pain. While males traditionally perform MMH tasks, recently the number of females who undertake these physically-demanding activities is also increasing. To evaluate the risk of mechanical injuries, the majority of previous studies have estimated spinal forces using different modeling approaches that mostly focus on male individuals. Notable sex-dependent differences have, however, been reported in torso muscle strength and anatomy, segmental mass distribution, as well as lifting strategy during MMH. Therefore, this study aimed to use sex-specific models to estimate lumbar spinal and muscle forces during... 

Left Ventricular Assist Devices (LVAD) have received renewed interest as a bridge-to-transplantation as well as a bridge-to-recovery device. Ironically, reports of malfunction and complications have hindered the growth of this device. In particular, the main concern is LVAD's susceptibility to excessive backlash and suction as a result of ows that are either too low or high, respectively. This study utilizes a well-established physiological model of the cardiovascular system as a reliable platform to study a proposed adaptive robust controller for a rotary motor based LVAD which overcomes such shortcomings. Proposed controller performance is evaluated by comparing simulated natural heart... 

This paper focuses on developing a new configuration on magnetorheological (MR) brake damper as prosthetic knee. Knee uses magnetic fields to vary the viscosity of the MR fluid, and thereby its flexion resistance. Exerted transmissibility torque of the knee greatly depends on the magnetic field intensity in the MR fluid. In this study a rotary damper using MR fluid is addressed in which a single rotary disc will act as a brake while MR fluid is activated by magnetic field in different walking gait. The main objective of this study is to investigate a prosthetic knee with one activating rotary disc to accomplish necessary braking torque in walking gait via implementing of Newton's equation of... 

The release of anticoagulant drugs such as warfarin from human serum albumin (HSA) has been important not only mechanistically but also clinically for patients who take multiple drugs simultaneously. In this study, the role of some commonly used drugs, including s-ibuprofen, ascorbic acid, and salicylic acid, was investigated in the release of warfarin bound to HSA in silico. The effects of the aforementioned drugs on the HSA-warfarin complex were investigated with molecular dynamics (MD) simulations using two approaches; in the first perspective, molecular docking was used to model the interaction of each drug with the HSA-warfarin complex, and in the second approach, drugs were positioned... 

The model introduced in this article for neural system describes both physiological and psychological concepts of neural system and is based on the models of individual elements of the system. This model includes psychological characteristics such as; perception, prediction, learning and response planning, and physiological features such as; sensory analysis, memory and motor execution. The model is designed in such a way that it describes the performance of the neural system for a key-pressing test. The key-pressing experiment consists of a screen with numbers from 1 to 9, which is shown to the operator where one of the numbers is specified by a special color and the operator is to push the... 

Short-term interaction between heart rate (HR) and physiological measures like blood pressure and respiration reveals relevant information about autonomic nervous system (ANS) function. Complex mathematical models for describing their couplings have been proposed in the literature. However, an accurate estimation of their parameters in an inverse modeling problem is crucial to extract reliable ANS related indices. This study considers a physiologically-based model of the cardiovascular-respiratory system and ANS control that presents the neural and mechanical effects of respiration separately. The estimation method is evaluated on synthetic signals. An accurate estimation of the... 

This study describes a multidimensional 3D/lumped parameter (LP) model which contains appropriate inflow/outflow boundary conditions in order to model the entire human arterial trees. A new extensive LP model of the entire arterial network (48 arteries) was developed including the effect of vessel diameter tapering and the parameterization of resistance, conductor and inductor variables. A computer aided-design (CAD) algorithm was proposed to efficiently handle the coupling of two or more 3D models with the LP model, and substantially lessen the coupling processing time. Realistic boundary conditions and Navier-Stokes equations in healthy and stenosed models of carotid artery bifurcation... 

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) has long been known as one of the most anonymous reasons for death around the world. A presentation of a model of what happens in the process has been under study for many years; and yet it remains a question due to physiological, geometrical and computational complications. Although the facilities for soft tissue modeling have improved and the precise CT-imaging of human head has revealed novel details of brain, skull and the interface (the meninges), a comprehensive FEM model of TBI is still being studied. This study aims to present an optimized model of human head including the brain, skull, and the meninges after a comprehensive study of the previous models.... 

A fast algorithm based on the nonlinear dynamical model for the electrocardiogram (ECG) is presented for the precise extraction of the characteristic points of these signals with baseline drift. Using the adaptive bionic wavelet transform, the baseline wander is removed efficiently. In fact by the means of the bionic wavelet transform, the resolution in the time-frequency domain can be adaptively adjusted not only by the signal frequency but also by the signal instantaneous amplitude and its first-order differential, which results in a better baseline wander cancellation. At the next step the parameters of the model are chosen to have the least square error with the original ECG. Determining... 

Gas embolotherapy (GE) is a developing medical method which can be utilized either as an autonomous therapeutic method to treat vascularized solid tumors, or it can be combined with other medical procedures—such as high-intensity focused ultrasound—to improve their efficiency. This paper is dedicated to investigating the different parameters which influence bubble lodging inside human vasculature via 2D-modeling of bubble dynamics in arteries’ and arterioles’ bifurcations which are potential sticking positions. Values used in the simulations are in accordance with the non-dimensional physiological numbers. It is found out that inlet pressure plays a decisive role in bubble lodging; the lower... 

Conventional models of cardiovascular system (CV) frequently lack required detail. Once utilized to study the heart function, these models focus primarily on the overall relationship between pressure, flow and volume. This study proposes a localized and regional model of the CV system. It utilizes non-invasive blood flow and pressure seed data and temporal cardiac muscle regional activation to predict the operation of the heart. Proposed localized analysis considers specific regions of the heart, namely base, mid and apex sections of the left ventricle. This modular system is based on a hydraulic electric analogy model, estimating desired parameters, namely resistance (R), compliance (C),... 

Body posture measurement approaches, required in biomechanical models to assess risk of musculoskeletal injuries, are usually costly and/or impractical for use in real workplaces. Therefore, we recently developed three artificial neural networks (ANNs), based on measured posture data on several individuals, to predict whole body 3D posture (coordinates of 15 markers located on body's main joints), segmental orientations (Euler angles of 14 body segments), and lumbosacral (L5-S1) moments during static manual material handling (MMH) activities (ANNPosture, ANNAngle, and ANNMoment, respectively). These ANNs require worker's body height, body weight (only for ANNMoment), hand-load 3D position,... 

Superparamagnetic zinc ferrite spinel-graphene nanostructures were synthesized as potential therapeutic agents in the magnetic targeted photothermal therapy of cancer and/or drug delivery. The global temperature of the solution and the local temperature at the nanoparticle (NP) surface determine the protein corona composition/content, which in turn affects the biological effects of NPs and the corresponding physiological responses. Therefore, it is rational to hypothesize that spinel-graphene nanostructures may have distinct protein corona compositions and contents, and therapeutic and toxic effects under laser irradiation. To assess this hypothesis, the effects of laser irradiation on the... 

Organ-on-a-chip technology tries to mimic the complexity of native tissues in vitro. Important progress has recently been made in using this technology to study the gut with and without microbiota. These in vitro models can serve as an alternative to animal models for studying physiology, pathology, and pharmacology. While these models have greater physiological relevance than two-dimensional (2D) cell systems in vitro, endocrine and immunological functions in gut-on-a-chip models are still poorly represented. Furthermore, the construction of complex models, in which different cell types and structures interact, remains a challenge. Generally, gut-on-a-chip models have the potential to... 

Non-invasive measurement of flow-mediated dilation (FMD) in the brachial artery for assessing endothelial function is costly and operator-dependent, limiting its application to research cases. In this paper, an approach based on a physiological model between normalized central blood pressure and finger photoplethysmogram is presented. Baseline model parameters are estimated using a genetic algorithm in 30 subjects consisting of ten normal blood pressure (BP), ten high-BP and ten elderly volunteers. Beat-to-beat fitness values after reactive hyperaemia are calculated using baseline (before cuff occlusion) data. Results show that stimulus-induced changes are fairly described with a first order...