Biomedical Devices

Chronic and acute pain affect ~100 million people in the US and greatly increase national rates of morbidity, mortality, and disability. Pain not only negatively impacts individual lives in significant ways, it also imposes enormous national economic costs (up to $635B annually). The misuse of and addiction to opioids, such as prescription pain relievers, heroin, and synthetic opioids (e.g., fentanyl and carfentanil) is a serious national crisis. Currently ~130 Americans die of opioid overdose every day.

Chronic and acute pain affect ~100 million people in the US and greatly increase national rates of morbidity, mortality, and disability. Pain not only negatively impacts individual lives in significant ways, it also imposes enormous national economic costs (up to $635B annually). The misuse of and addiction to opioids, such as prescription pain relievers, heroin, and synthetic opioids (e.g., fentanyl and carfentanil) is a serious national crisis. Currently ~130 Americans die of opioid overdose every day.

For patients to benefit from state-of-the-art high-channel-count neural-interface technology, translatable implant packaging technology is needed to support it. Despite advances in implant electronics, batteries, enclosures, and even high-feedthrough-count and high-feedthrough-density headers, the lack of advancement in implant connector technology has imposed an often-unacceptable tradeoff between high interface channel count and the ability to disconnect and reconnect implanted interface leads from packaged and implanted electronics.

For amputees to exploit the full capability of state-of-the-art prosthetic limbs with rapid fine-movement control and high- resolution sensory percepts, a nerve-interface with a large number of reliable and independent channels of motor and sensory information is needed. The strongest signal sources in nerves are the nodes of Ranvier, which are essentially distributed randomly within a small 3-D volume. Thus, to comprehensively engage with the electrical activity of a nerve, a neural interface should interrogate a nerve in a 3-D volume of the same scale.

A Tissue Engineered Electronic Nerve Interface (TEENI) combines research areas including flexbile MEMS device fabrication, Hydrogels, Magnetic Microparticle Templating, Tissue Scaffolding, and Nerve Regeneration to develop a highly compliant and versatile interface for stimulating and recording the peripheral nerve with the potential for electrode density to scale in a truly 3-Dimensionsal fashion.

The aim of this project is to utilize the controllable nature of Graphene Oxide as an ultrathin separation membrane in biological applications, specifically targetting removal of uremic toxins. 

The goal of this project is to develop an OCT system with a miniature imaging probe that can utilize birefringence for enhanced contrast as well as provide vascular distribution information.

The major goal of this project is to develop a MEMS-based miniature imaging probe that can perform three-dimensional imaging in vivo inside human body using nonlinear optical effects. 

The goal of this project is to develop a light-weigth optical probe that can be mounted on a freely moving mouse and continuously obtain in vivo 3D imaging of neural activity, particularly using Ca²⁺ fluorescence imaging. MEMS technology is used for miniaturization. 

The goal of this project is to develop a miniature two-photon microscopy probe with light weight and use it on freely behaving mice for in vivo 3D neural imaging. Both 2-axis MEMS scanning mirror and z-axis tunable microlens will be developed. Double-cladding photonic crystal fibers will be used to accommodate the excitation laser and the frequency-doubled two-photon signals.