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)