Michael Yancey - Dr. Ting Cong - Week 7

For the femoral head project, I primarily worked on CT image processing and analysis of the femurs, both in their native state and after our testing (including simulating a subchondral bone fracture and performing impaction grafting to repair). One of our desired outcomes for the study is bone density, measured in hounsfield units (HU) both of the native bone and of the fracture/graft region. Higher density in the fracture volume is likely due to improved packing of the graft, i.e. reducing space between grafted osteopearl beads, and may indicate better mechanical strength.

This week, I finalized the methodology for calculating HU of the graft region and will be performing the analysis on our 14 samples during our final immersion term week. In short, the image processing methodology involves selecting the defect volume as an ROI, obtaining the average pixel intensity over that region, then performing a linear transform from pixel intensity to HU—using the rescale slope and intercept from the image's metadata.


Shown is one CT image slice featuring a cross-section of a femoral head and osteopearl bead graft packed into the defect volume.

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For the alginate hydrogel project, we performed widefield microscopy on two more gel variations—"high molecular weight - low calcium" and "high molecular weight - high calcium". These high MW gels are significantly more viscous than their low MW counterparts; however, while we counted many live cells in the gel, we observed no cellular movement. 

We have previously limited our imaging sessions to 48-72 hours after seeding the gels with cells and our stain, so I hypothesized that there is more cell movement shortly after seeding, before cells settle and attach to the gel. This coming week we will be attempting to visualize cells approximately 4 hours after seeding, although one hurdle I anticipate encountering is poor cell staining; previously it seemed to take about 48 hours for stain to diffuse throughout the hydrogel and into cells, so we may not be able to visualize anything.

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