Electrophysiological Evaluation of the Continuity and Transmurality of Surgical Ablation Lesions in Ex Vivo Perfused Porcine Hearts by Unipolar High-Resolution Mapping

Introduction: Currently, there is no method available for intra-operative evaluation of the completeness (transmurality and continuity) of surgical ablation lesions. This study aimed to investigate the changes in electrogram characteristics and activation patterns caused by different (non)transmural and (dis)continuous ablation lesions in ex...

Iron oxide nanoparticles as carriers for the Dy-166/Ho-166 in vivo generator: A study into the characteristics and retention of Dy and Ho in iron oxide nanoparticles

Background:<br/>Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Targeted radionuclide therapy has become a important treatment, this is when a carrier molecule is attached to a radionuclide to deliver cytotoxic radiation levels to diseased cells. β<br/>− emitters are frequently used in RNT because they have a long penetration depth, such...

Polymeric micelles as carriers for a 166Dy/166Ho in vivo generator

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world. Because of this, there are many novel methods to treat it being currently researched. One of the answers from the nuclear medicine perspective is Radionuclide Therapy, where alpha or beta emitters are applied, with the goal to selectively irradiate tumours in the...

Cardiac mapping on ex vivo perfused porcine slaughterhouse hearts: A Langendorff perfusion protocol for epicardial mapping on isolated beating hearts

Cardiac mapping techniques, in which an electrode-array is placed directly on the surface of the heart, were developed to gain a better insight in the underlying electropathology of cardiac arrhythmias. This procedure is performed in patients undergoing cardiac surgery, but here not all relevant cardiac structures and conduction inquiries can be...

Large bone-implants for osteochondral regeneration, fabrication and ex-vivo testing

The high frequency of osteoarthritis in those aged above 60 years combined with the observing trend of overpopulation leads to increased healthcare costs. To date, clinical treatments seem to be insufficient to restore cartilage and underlying bone degeneration. Bioprinting fabrication techniques constitute a promising approach to mimic and...

Prolonged Ex vivo Preservation: Creating a Normothermic Machine Perfusion Setup

Expanded Criteria Donor (ECD) organs are being used more often in clinical setting. The regenerative ability of the organs might be able to restore the organ to full functionality ex vivo. For long term kidney stabilization, optimization and monitoring an organ incubator is preferable. However, it is unclear which available parts would work best...

Transceive Phase Corrected Contrast Source Inversion-Electrical Properties Tomography

Electrical properties tomography is the quantification of the conductivity and permittivity of different materials. In an MRI setting this can be used to map the electrical properties of tissue. These values can be used as a different contrast mechanism, for hyperthermia treatment or the improvement of antenna design for specific applications....

Modelling Micromotion of Implants in the Rat Femur: A rat femoral knee prosthesis to simulate aseptic loosening

Background: Aseptic loosening [AL] of cementless implants is causing approximately 60% of total knee and total hip arthroplasty revisions. AL is caused among other factors by micromotion. The result is that the bone around the prosthesis is replaced by a fibrous membrane. This fibrous membrane allows for more micromotion and we thus enter a...

3D Tracking of Radioactive Particles in Small Animals

Fast and precise in vivo tracking of nanoparticles or single cells could provide better understanding of drug and stem cell delivery. Present SPECT with traditional collimators lack sensitivity to achieve sufficiently high frame rates. In this project a multi-slit SPECT system with stationary detectors was designed to track nanoparticles with a...

Development of a framework to perform longitudinal micro-computed tomography monitoring on ex vivo embryonic chick femur cultures

In the field of bone tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, ex vivo embryonic chick femur culture models have demonstrated their experimental advantages. The work reported in this thesis was dedicated to the development of a framework through a bioreactor approach in combination with the technology of micro-computed tomography (?CT) to...