Biomedical sciences instrumentation
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Human modelling is an interdisciplinary research field. The topic, emotion-affected decision making, was originally a cognitive psychology issue, but is now recognized as an important research direction for both computer science and biomedical modelling. ⋯ The work is based on Ortony's theory of emotions and bounded rationality theory, and attempts to connect the emotion process with decision making. A computational emotion model is proposed, and the initial framework of this model in virtual human simulation within the platform of Virtools is presented.
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Comparative Study
Head acceleration is less than 10 percent of helmet acceleration in football impacts.
Sports-related concussions constitute 20 percent of brain injuries each year in the United States. Concussion research has included a variety of instrumentation and techniques to measure head accelerations. Most recently, the Head Impact Telemetry (HIT) System (Simbex, Lebanon, NH), a wireless system that provides real-time data from impacts, is used to measure in-situ head accelerations in collegiate football. ⋯ The impact locations were on the side, back, top and just above the facemask on the front. By comparing these two measured head accelerations and the helmet acceleration during a pendulum impact, it is shown that the response of the head and the helmet vary greatly and the in-helmet system matches the head and not helmet acceleration. Specifically, head acceleration is less than 10 percent of helmet acceleration in football impacts; moreover, the HIT System is able to accurately measure the head acceleration.
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Clinical Trial
Reliability of respiratory tidal volume estimation by means of ambulatory inductive plethysmography.
Ambulatory monitoring of ventilatory parameters in everyday life, field research and clinical situations may offer new insights into respiratory functioning in health and disease. Recent technological advances that employ ambulatory inductive plethysmography could make monitoring of respiration outside the clinic and laboratory feasible. Inductive plethysmography provides a method for nonintrusive assessment of both timing (e.g. respiration rate) and volumetric parameters (e.g. tidal volume and minute ventilation), by which tidal volume is initially calibrated to direct measures of volume. ⋯ Furthermore, reliability estimates were high and consistent across respiratory measures (typically r's = 0.7-0.8). These results suggest the validity of ambulatory inductive plethysmographic measurement of respiration, at least under relatively sedentary conditions. Findings also point to the stability of individual differences in respiratory parameters over consecutive weeks.
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The purpose of this study is to develop injury risk functions that predict zygoma fracture based on baseball type and impact velocity. Zygoma fracture strength data from published experiments were mapped with the force exerted by a baseball on the orbit as a function of ball velocity. Using a normal distribution, zygoma fracture risk functions were developed. ⋯ The experimental results validated the zygoma risk functions at the lower and upper levels. The injuries observed in the post test analysis included fractures of the zygomatic arch, frontal process and the maxilla, zygoma suture, with combinations of these creating comminuted, tripod fractures of the zygoma. Tests with a softer baseball did result in injury but these had fewer resulting zygoma bone fragments and occurred at velocities 50% higher than the major league ball.
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Previous research has developed a pneumatically driven device for delivering a controlled mechanical insult to cultured neurons. The neuronal cell culture was injured by applying a transient air pulse to a culture well fitted with a highly elastic Silastic culture well bottom. ⋯ The simulation results, using a finite element model of the culture well membrane, compared well with the results from the original experiments. When peak air pressure was varied from 69 kPa to 345 kPa (10 to 50 psig), numerical simulations showed that the corresponding membrane strains varied from 20 to 95% and the stress response varied from 0.5 to 1.2 MPa.