12,545 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
An examination of walking track analysis footprints of right-side unoperated limbs in rats prior to and following peripheral nerve injury and PEG fusion repair
Peripheral nerve injury can result in long-lasting functional deficits in humans due to mammals’ limited axon regenerative capacity. PEG fusion is a defined technique that fuses injured axons, resulting in morphological and electrophysiological continuity. The technology has been shown to restore lost behaviors due to peripheral nerve injury. The process involves an invasive surgical procedure on the left hind limb of female Sprague-Dawley rats that results in the severance of the sciatic nerve. Assessing behavioral recovery is perhaps the most important metric by which to quantify PEG fusion’s success. Recovery is most accurately and best assessed using the Sciatic Functional Index walking track analysis, or SFI. This procedure involves having a rat run up a path with its paws inked, and subsequent analysis compares the print length, toe spread, and intermediate toe spread of the “normal” and unoperated side (right) with the “experimental” and operated side (left). In this paper, we examine if surgical intervention and sciatic nerve transection on the left, experimental limb in rats results in significantly altered measurements on the right, unoperated side compared to pre-op, baseline measurements. Comparisons are made between baseline normal prints, normal prints three days post-op, and normal prints 42 days post-op for PEG-fused animals. Differences may exist due to altered gait after operation, physiological effects of surgical intervention, or random variation in the SFI testing paradigm. Regardless, attempting to highlight such discrepancies can contribute to developing better models for measuring recovery following peripheral nerve injury in mammals. Such models would more accurately be able to predict the clinical translatability of potential treatments for these nerve injuries. Analysis of SFI measurements pre- and post-op suggests that surgical intervention on the left experimental hind limb of rats does result in statistically significant differences in measured print length, toe spread, and intermediate toe spread post-op. In addition, we found that the differences between baseline and post-op measurements seem to become mitigated over time.Neuroscienc
A study of electrochemical transport and diffuse charge dynamics using a Langevin equation
This thesis aims to develop new numerical and computational tools to study electrochemical transport and diffuse charge dynamics at small scales. Previous efforts at modeling electrokinetic phenomena at scales where the noncontinuum effects become significant have included continuum models based on the Poisson-Nernst-Planck equations and atomic simulations using molecular dynamics algorithms. Neither of them is easy to use or conducive to electrokinetic transport modeling in strong confinement or over long time scales. This work introduces a new approach based on a Langevin equation for diffuse charge dynamics in nanofluidic devices, which incorporates features from both continuum and atomistic methods. The model is then extended to include steric effects resulting from finite ion size, and applied to the phenomenon of double layer charging in a symmetric binary electrolyte between parallel-plate blocking electrodes, between which a voltage is applied. Finally, the results of this approach are compared to those of the continuum model based on the Poisson-Nernst-Planck equations
- …