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Courtesy Michigan Tech
Engineering Better Health
Adrienne Minerick’s lab develops medical microdevices that can deliver immediate diagnoses at the point of care.
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Courtesy Michigan Tech
Engineering Better Health
Biomedical engineering students work on everything from medical instruments...
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Courtesy Michigan Tech
Engineering Better Health
and sensors on cardiac leads...
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Courtesy Michigan Tech
Engineering Better Health
... to a better heart monitor. They apply that experience during the Senior Design program, which tasks students with solving engineering problems from industry partners.
Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Be it magic or science fiction made fact, nearly 50 years after Dr. “Bones” McCoy diagnosed patients with a flick of his tricorder on “Star Trek,” Michigan Technological University’s researcher Adrienne Minerick is leading the design of such futuristic technology – a portable device that delivers a diagnosis in minutes from a single drop of blood.
That’s just one example of medical magic being made real at Michigan Tech, and in a popular field. “We can’t keep up with the demand,” says Sean Kirkpatrick, chair of the biomedical engineering department. He had 275 undergraduates last year. “Every year is a record year for us, at the undergraduate and graduate level.”
The influx of students goes along with research coming out of Michigan Tech that could create medical wonders. Highlighted here are a few of those innovations. Not every project makes it to market, but each offers hands-on training for Michigan Tech students with “really unique solutions” to real-world problems, Sean says.
Smiles & Sunshine
You always know when you’ve had too much sun – after exposure – thanks to painful sunburn.
A team at Michigan Tech has developed a way to know before the burn when to come out of the sun.
A smiley face skin patch that darkens with UV exposure should remove the guesswork during a day in the sun and reduce skin cancer risk. When the smiley face disappears, it’s time to seek shade or cover up.
The team made three prototypes with varying levels of sensitivity to accommodate different skin types. The patch also uses a medical-grade adhesive, so it won’t fall off in the water. When you reapply sunscreen, the patch will darken more slowly, extending your time in the sunshine.
The project was first tackled by a senior design team during the 2012-13 school year. Guided by co-advisers Megan Frost and Sean Kirkpatrick, it won the Best Overall Award at the university’s 2013 Undergraduate Expo. A subsequent student team continued work on the prototype, and administrators are now evaluating its market potential.
Seeing Eye Leg
Courtesy Michigan Tech
Engineering Better Health
Mo Rastgaar’s team has built a prosthetic leg that can “see” the ground ahead.
Try this quick experiment: Stand beside something sturdy, just in case, then stand on one foot. Feel how your ankle makes tiny adjustments, left and right and front and back, to keep you balanced? That balancing act is actually a constant in your motions. That subtle correction is lost for amputees using the rigid, passive prosthetic ankles on the market.
Mo Rastgaar, assistant professor and founding director of MTU’s Human-Interactive Robotics Lab, has a better solution. His powered robotic ankle uses sensors on the foot’s sole and a microprocessor to interpret intent. (Is the user walking straight ahead or turning? Our ankles move differently in each case, Mo says.) The multiaxis prosthetic joint, which has the range of motion of a flesh-and-blood ankle, uses the sensor data to make a more natural gait.
Another prototype incorporates a front-facing camera that automatically adjusts each footstep on uneven surfaces and obstacles – important here in the north, where winter and its walkway navigational challenges reign for so long each year.
Mo received a five-year Faculty Early Career Development Award worth nearly $500,000 from the National Science Foundation.
“I wanted to help people in a very direct way, and that’s what we are doing,” Mo says. “Eventually, I’d like to commercialize our prosthesis. It should be helping amputees walk.”
A “Disappearing” Stent
Stents made of metal mesh have been used to restore blood flow through narrowed arteries since the 1980s. It’s a common, potentially heart attack-thwarting, cardiac procedure.
These permanent stents aren’t without long-term risks, though. Believed to be beneficial for only a year or two, they may later cause blood clots, inflammation or other dangerous side effects.
“Making a bioabsorbable stent could be an attractive solution,” Associate Professor Jeremy Goldman said when unveiling his latest research this year. “You could have all the early beneficial characteristics, but none of the harmful later ones, and you’d be left with a natural artery.”
Jeremy’s stent will use a zinc alloy that slowly dissolves into the bloodstream, leaving nothing behind after its job is done. Zinc is already found naturally in the body and, according to researchers, may even help prevent the artery from filling with plaque again.
Animal testing of the zinc stents could begin this year, in partnership with the University of Michigan and a German manufacturer.
Battling Breast Cancer
Michigan Tech’s Jingfeng Jiang has developed a new type of breast-cancer test, an ultrasound elastograph. By measuring tissue stiffness – cancerous tissue is very stiff – it can produce more conclusive results than a mammogram.
Unfortunately, most clinicians have little experience with elastographs and struggle to interpret them correctly. To help, Jingfeng and his team have built the breast cancer equivalent of a flight simulator. Their software lets clinicians practice scanning for tumors in a three-dimensional virtual breast.
Tissue Engineering
Courtesy Michigan Tech
Engineering Better Health
Feng Zhao, an assistant professor at Michigan Tech, leads the stem cell and tissue engineering lab, developing new ways to create wholly biological tissues.
Assistant Professor Feng Zhao might be called a home building expert for the body.
When scientists grow tissue in the lab, cells need to attach to something, much as home drywall is attached to a frame. In the body, this scaffolding is called an extracellular matrix. Researchers have tried to build synthetic scaffolding with limited success.
Feng’s breakthrough work leaves the synthetic materials behind. She has built highly organized scaffolding with fibroblast cells, used naturally by the body. “The blend of sugars and proteins mimics the body’s biology, meaning it’s completely biological,” she said after her research was published. “Since it’s made of the same building blocks as natural scaffolding, we see a much higher biocompatibility when a lab-grown tissue is introduced into the body.”
The new scaffolding could be used to grow specialized soft tissues like blood vessels, which Feng says are in high demand.
It’s easy to foresee high demand for Feng’s innovation, too, and for other medical magic from the labs of Michigan Tech.