Are you interested in getting into Women’s Health research as a bioengineer? Here’s a perfect place to start! The Royal Society Publishing has recently published a special issue of Interface Focus entitled
Bioengineering in women’s health, Volume 1: female health and pathology and Volume 2: pregnancy—from implantation to parturition. Both issues are organized by Kristin Miller, Kristin Myers and Michelle Oyen and the articles for both issues can be accessed directly at Volume 1 and Volume 2.
Our new manuscript detailing the mechanical properties of the cervix subjected to infection- and hormone-mediated premature cervical remodeling is now online in Acta Biomaterialia.
The article is authored by Charles Jayyosi in collaboration with Mala Mahendroo’s lab at UTSWMC.
Article – Acta Biomaterialia:
The mechanical response of the mouse cervix to tensile cyclic loading in term and preterm pregnancy
Raw Data – Columbia Academic Commons:
https://doi.org/10.7916/D8BZ7PMS
Along with our long-time colleague David Elad from Tel Aviv University and the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University, we are happy to announce the online release of our Biomechanics of the Human Uterus review article. The article is published in WIRES Systems Biology and Medicine.
Andrea’s first paper on calculating the effects of cervical geometry and cervical material properties on the mechanical loading of the cervical os has been published by the ASME Journal of Biomechanical Engineering. The paper is entitled, A Parameterized Ultrasound-Based Finite Element Analysis of the Mechanical Environment of Pregnancy, and the methodology takes advantage of ultrasound data of the maternal anatomy to build parametric models of the pregnant abdomen.
With our collaborator Christine Hendon in Electrical Engineering here at Columbia, we have characterized the collagen fiber directionality of the human cervix using optical coherence tomography (OCT). Our results are now published in a study entitled, Collagen Fiber Orientation and Dispersion in the Upper Cervix of Non-Pregnant and Pregnant Women on the PLOS ONE website. The study is co-authored by Wang (Frank) Yao from the Myers lab and Yu Gan from the Hendon lab.
All raw data are available on the Columbia University Academic Commons website (http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8BG2PCX).
Our paper titled, “Material properties of mouse cervical tissue in normal gestation” has been published in Acta Biomaterialia. This paper outlines our experimental and inverse finite element methods to calculate the material property changes of the mouse cervix in a normal pregnancy. Here, we found that cervical stiffness in a mouse decreases by 4 orders of magnitude within a 19-day mouse pregnancy. Our raw data from this study is also available at the Columbia University Library’s Academic Commons (http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8DN44QW)
Our preterm birth research is featured in the Fall/Winter 2015 Columbia Medicine Alumni Magazine along with all of our Columbia colleagues working towards understanding and reducing the burden of preterm birth.
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Find our new finite element study of pregnancy on-line in Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering. This study calculates the mechanical loading on the cervix for two pregnant patients, using geometry derived from MRI scans and material parameters from our previous experiments.
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The Myers lab is featured in this Summer’s edition of Connections (pages 7-8) – a Newsletter from the Columbia University Medical Center Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. The article details our collaborative relationship with clinicians and scientists to unravel the causes of preterm birth. Here, we discuss how we use our finite elements models of pregnancy to understand how the cervix acts as a mechanical barrier to protect the fetus.
kristinmyerscolumbia.com 