Schizophrenia is a neurological disease that affects 20 million people world-wide. Previous research has linked Schizophrenia post-mortem to abnormalities in axon distribution and integrity within the corpus callosum. Therefore, it is of high interest to investigate methods that will eventually be able to measure axon diameters in areas such as the corpus callosum in live brains. This would...
Tissue microstructure, such as axon diameters, can be inferred from MRI diffusion measurements either through relating models of the geometry of the tissue and MR parameters, or through directly relating MR measurements to tissue parameters. Some have implemented geometric models to infer axon diameters using temporal diffusion spectroscopy. In order to target smaller diameter axons, we have...
Our lab has been investigating the use of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) for the rapid detection and diagnosis of bacterial pathogens. LIBS is a spectrochemical technique that utilizes a laser to produce a near instantaneous elemental assay of a substance. The laser interacts with the substance to produce a high-temperature microplasma. As the plasma cools it emits light, which is...
Purpose : The Task Group 211 report of the American Association of Medical Physicists (AAPM) made a literature review of various segmentation techniques for nuclear medicine. These methods are valid and strong in the context of static images; when faced with dynamic images, many challenges arise, and the user-dependency becomes problematic.
Material : Many dynamic TEP acquisitions had been...
Laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is a technique whereby time-resolved optical emission spectroscopy is performed on high-temperature laser-induced plasmas to determine the elemental composition of the target. This lab uses LIBS to identify and classify bacterial pathogens based on differences in the concentrations of inorganic elements in the membrane of bacterial cells. This rapid...
Chemical reaction networks allow cells to sense and adapt to sustained environmental perturbations. Due to inherent stochasticity and low copy numbers, biochemical regulatory modules must achieve adaptation despite significant fluctuations, limiting the applicability of classical control theory to understand and rationally design such modules. Recent theoretical work has established the class...
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that causes loss of memory. In AD neuronal cell dysfunction and death are caused by amyloid aggregates which are toxic to the cellular membrane and cause membrane damage. The cellular membrane is a complex non-homogeneous bilayer and plays an important role in the amyloid toxicity. We previously showed that model lipid...
The amyloid-β peptide (Aβ1-42) is regarded as a major pathogenic factor in Alzheimer’s disease—a debilitating neurodegenerative disorder that causes memory loss and neuronal damage in elderly patients. Aβ forms toxic oligomers capable of binding to neuronal membranes and inducing damage through their insertion and subsequent formation of ion channels or pores in these membranes (Drolle et al,...
Hyperpolarized 129Xe lung MRI(1,2) is an efficient technique used to investigate and assess pulmonary diseases. The technique provides physiologically-relevant-biomarkers of obstructive lung-disease including emphysema, bronchopulmonary-dysplasia, congenital lobar emphysema and alpha-1-antitrypsin-deficiency.(3) However, the longitudinal observation of the emphysema progression using...
Damage to healthy tissue is a major concern in external beam radiation therapy. The risk of normal tissue complications from dose delivered outside the target reduces the effectiveness and safety of treatment. To mitigate this, research is oriented towards improving dose conformity to the target, and towards limiting damage inflicted by any wayward dose. Recent studies have reinforced older...
Causal connections between biological molecules in reaction networks are often inferred by examining the correlation in the average levels of to component molecules across a range of drug perturbations to cells. At thermodynamic equilibrium, the fluctuation dissipation theorem relates a stochastic system’s perturbation responses and correlations between variables in its spontaneous...
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurological degenerative disorder, clinically characterized as a cognitive impairment type of dementia. Structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) is able to observe subtle structural alterations clearly in brain tissue and is widely used in the diagnosis of neurological disorders such as AD. However, the size distribution of the pathological area is more...
Brachytherapy is a type of cancer treatment that uses inserted needles that act as antennas to deliver radiation to the diseased tissue. A prototype medical device has been developed and built at Western University to provide an innovative technique to guide needle applicators in clinical ultrasound images. The device consists of a micromotor, battery, and contact shaft. The current standard...
Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) affects ~10% of the world population. There is no cure for CKD and kidney transplantation remains the only option. However, the donor pool is very small compared to the number of patients on the waiting list. This small donor pool consequentially leads to patients receiving older, less healthy kidneys with pre-existing fibrosis. Fibrosis is characterized by the...
Introduction: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a complex disease defined by fixed airflow obstruction in the lungs, and is currently the 3rd leading cause of death globally. Female smokers are ~50% more likely than male smokers to develop COPD, yet, the reasons for females' higher susceptibility to COPD remains largely unknown. The objective of this study was to investigate...
Antimicrobial resistance is a major global health threat, and it is on the rise. Roughly, 0.7 million people are dying of infections that in the past would have been cured by antibiotics. New techniques and approaches are therefore urgently needed. We are in a position to create new antibiotics and design new rules to combat Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) by implementing deep learning, a...
Introduction: Quantification of oxygenation in a contactless manner is of interest in a variety of clinical scenarios, with diabetic wound management being one example. However, the development of such technology requires a reproducible and well-understood model of ischemia, including both inducement and measure effect using a reference standard, which is currently lacking. In our present...
The high total concentration of macromolecules inside living cells leads to the emergence of a phenomenon called macromolecular crowding which affects various protein processes including folding. In general, interactions between a protein and surrounding crowder molecules can involve both attractions and repulsive excluded volume forces. Here we revisit the effect of purely repulsive crowders...
