Worcester Polytechnic Institute

About: Worcester Polytechnic Institute is a education organization based out in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Computer science & Population. The organization has 6270 authors who have published 12704 publications receiving 332081 citations. The organization is also known as: WPI.

Impedance spectroscopy system for ischemia monitoring and detection

Abstract: An impedance spectroscopy tissue status monitoring and measurement system is disclosed. The system uses a synthesizer to generates electrical signals of selected frequencies. An electrical current source is responsive to the synthesizer and generates electrical currents for transmission through tissue. Electrodes or inductive coils of the system apply the electrical current to the tissue and sense voltages generated in the tissue in response to the electrical current. A controller determines the spectral response of the tissue by detecting magnitude and phase information of the electrical energy transmitted through the tissue. The information is then used to determine volumes of compartments within the tissue and ionic concentrations of compartmental fluids. Capacitive effects derived from the phase information are used to determine cell membrane functionality within the tissue. From this analysis, status, specifically, ischemia, may be determined on an absolute basis.

Combining Dynamic Stretch and Tunable Stiffness to Probe Cell Mechanobiology In Vitro

Abstract: Cells have the ability to actively sense their mechanical environment and respond to both substrate stiffness and stretch by altering their adhesion, proliferation, locomotion, morphology, and synthetic profile. In order to elucidate the interrelated effects of different mechanical stimuli on cell phenotype in vitro, we have developed a method for culturing mammalian cells in a two-dimensional environment at a wide range of combined levels of substrate stiffness and dynamic stretch. Polyacrylamide gels were covalently bonded to flexible silicone culture plates and coated with monomeric collagen for cell adhesion. Substrate stiffness was adjusted from relatively soft (G9=0.3 kPa) to stiff (G9=50 kPa) by altering the ratio of acrylamide to bis-acrylamide, and the silicone membranes were stretched over circular loading posts by applying vacuum pressure to impart near-uniform stretch, as confirmed by strain field analysis. As a demonstration of the system, porcine aortic valve interstitial cells (VIC) and human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSC) were plated on soft and stiff substrates either statically cultured or exposed to 10% equibiaxial or pure uniaxial stretch at 1Hz for 6 hours. In all cases, cell attachment and cell viability were high. On soft substrates, VICs cultured statically exhibit a small rounded morphology, significantly smaller than on stiff substrates (p,0.05). Following equibiaxial cyclic stretch, VICs spread to the extent of cells cultured on stiff substrates, but did not reorient in response to uniaxial stretch to the extent of cells stretched on stiff substrates. hMSCs exhibited a less pronounced response than VICs, likely due to a lower stiffness threshold for spreading on static gels. These preliminary data demonstrate that inhibition of spreading due to a lack of matrix stiffness surrounding a cell may be overcome by externally applied stretch suggesting similar mechanotransduction mechanisms for sensing stiffness and stretch.

Hematite‐Based Solar Water Splitting in Acidic Solutions: Functionalization by Mono‐ and Multilayers of Iridium Oxygen‐Evolution Catalysts

Abstract: Solar water splitting in acidic solutions has important technological implications, but has not been demonstrated to date in a dual absorber photoelectrochemical cell. The lack of functionally stable water-oxidation catalysts (WOCs) in acids is a key reason for this slow development. The only WOCs that are stable at low pH are Ir-based systems, which are typically too expensive to be implemented broadly. It is now shown that this deficiency may be corrected by applying an ultra-thin monolayer of a molecular Ir WOC to hematite for solar water splitting in acidic solutions. The turn-on voltage is observed to shift cathodically by 250 mV upon the application of a monolayer of the molecular Ir WOC. When the molecular WOC is replaced by a heterogeneous multilayer derivative, stable solar water splitting for over 5 h is achieved with near-unity Faradaic efficiency.

Energy aware efficient geographic routing in lossy wireless sensor networks with environmental energy supply

Abstract: Wireless sensor networks are characterized by multihop wireless lossy links and resource constrained nodes. Energy efficiency is a major concern in such networks. In this paper, we study Geographic Routing with Environmental Energy Supply (GREES) and propose two protocols, GREES-L and GREES-M, which combine geographic routing and energy efficient routing techniques and take into account the realistic lossy wireless channel condition and the renewal capability of environmental energy supply when making routing decisions. Simulation results show that GREESs are more energy efficient than the corresponding residual energy based protocols and geographic routing protocols without energy awareness. GREESs can maintain higher mean residual energy on nodes, and achieve better load balancing in terms of having smaller standard deviation of residual energy on nodes. Both GREES-L and GREES-M exhibit graceful degradation on end-to-end delay, but do not compromise the end-to-end throughput performance.