News from the BioEG
Congratulations to Brendan Geraghty for the success in clinical trials. A small scale, first in man, clinical study of the novel device involved 12 volunteers who wore the new contact lens device for more than an hour while under constant clinical observation has been completed at St. Paul’s Eye Unit in the Royal Liverpool University Hospital and at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. Read more.
Congratulation to Yichao Shi and Yueguang Liu, students from the University of Toronto on successful completion of their eight weeks placement at Biomechanical Engineering Group. They were trained in Matlab and Abaqus and now able to model complex numerical simulations. They worked on retinal detachment FE models, collected data from refractive implant simulations and completed many inverse analysis runs. They demonstrated excellent performance, and we would like to wish them both all the best.
Congratulations to Kike Moronkeji who has celebrated her PhD gradation. Kike’s PhD was funded by the Centre of Global Eco-Innovation and Renephra Ltd. Her project focussed on evaluating microneedle performance in relation to skin biomechanics.
Zhou Dong who is a PhD student at Biomechanical Engineering Group, submitted a poster at the end of his first year with the title “Microstructure based numerical model of ocular globe” which won the 2nd prize at School of Engineering, University of Liverpool amongst over 100 other atendees. He has done a remarkable work in a short period of time which attrackted many researchers’ attention.
Jos Vroon is a master student of Bio-Mechanical Design at the Delft University of Technology. He travelled to Liverpool for his thesis project which is a collaboration between the Delft University of Technology, the Rotterdam Eye Hospital and The University of Liverpool. The research is on the effect of gravity, head and eye movements on an existing retinal detachment. This project began with the aim of understanding the mechanics involved and validating or improving the current pre-operative procedure. This is done by further development of the current finite element model of the Biomechanical Engineering Group at the University of Liverpool. Project ends on mid December 2016.
Dual PhD Student Zhuo Chang along with his Liverpool and National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) supervisors, Dr Riaz Akhtar and Prof. Po-Yu Chen (NTHU) had a successful collaboration meeting with researchers at the Key Lab of Bionic Engineering, Jilin University, China in August 2016. Zhuo presented his research on in vitro characterisation of arterial stiffening and along with his supervisors discussed potential projects in cardiovascular biomechanics in collaboration with Jilin University. After two years at Liverpool, Zhuo will now spend one year conducting research in Prof. Chen’s lab in NTHU as part of his Dual PhD programme.
Ahmed Elsheikh, Ashkan Eliasy, Sherif Hassaan and Junjie Wang visited the Ocular Biomechanics Group at Wenzhou Medical University over two weeks on a trip funded by the Wenzhou group. Lab experiment facilities and test procedures examined and modified. Experimental results obtained from built-in-house instruments and previously discussed projects, analysed and a number of papers reviewed. Finally, a few projects discussed and planned for the future, including ”Development of an Intelligent Planning Tool for Refractive Surgeries”, “Effects of regional variation of in vivo corneal constitutive parameters on reflection of deformed corneas in keratoconus before and after corneal collagen cross linking therapy” and “Determining in vivo constitutive parameters of the cornea with Corvis ST”.
Junjie successfully finished his PhD on numerical simulation of corneal refractive surgery based on improved reconstruction of corneal surface. He is now working as a research associate at Biomechanical Engineering Group.
Congratulations to Dr Riaz Akhtar, he was recently awarded Best Poster prize at Artery 15 conference in Kraków, Poland (15th – 17th October 2015). The award sponsored by Elsevier has a value of €250. Riaz presented Zhuo Chang's work on the nanomechanical properties of the internal mammary artery. Zhuo is a Liverpool-NTHU Dual PhD student supervised by Dr Riaz Akhtar and Dr Paolo Paoletti. The work was conducted in collaboration with colleagues at University of Southern Denmark. Please click here to view the poster.
A research workshop was held in Barcelona on the 3rd of September to review progress on a new IOP correction algorithm that has been developed by the Biomechanical Engineering group. The algorithm is intended to reduce reliance of IOP measurements by the Corvis ST on variations in corneal stiffness parameters including thickness and material mechanical properties. The algorithm is likely to become part of the new Corvis ST software due for release in June 2016.
Ahmed Elsheikh, Brendan Geraghty and Charles Whitford visited the Ocular Biomechanics Group at Wenzhou Medical University over the first two weeks of August on a trip funded by the Wenzhou group. The trip was used to run a biomechanics workshop (which was attended by colleagues from across China), conduct a number of lab experiments, complete the writing of research papers and plans future activities.
A new software is being developed by the group (Dong Zhou and Ashkan Eliasy) to carry out inverse analysis operations, which are necessary to determine the material properties from mechanical lab tests. The Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) has been used as the optimisation engine of the new software. The results so far have been excellent.
Shao has started her work with the group a few months ago. Shao has an exciting project to understand the biomechanical and microstructural effects of the collagen cross-linking treatment adopted to halt the progression of keratoconus.
Dominic has completed his PhD project with the group recently and started a new post at the Scottish Crop Research Institute in Invergowrie, Tayside. Dominic’s work has been on the automatic segmentation of optical coherence tomography maps in order to re-produce 3D shapes of the anterior segment of the human eye included the cornea and the limbus. Dominic has published 4 papers on his research.
