Abstract Details
| Presented By: | Edgar, Lowell |
| Affiliated with: | University of Utah, Biomedical Engineering |
| Authors: | Margaret Julias, David Shreiber, Helen Buettner |
| From: | Rutgers the State University of New Jersey |
Title
Abstract
Traditional acupuncture therapy involves insertion and rotation of fine needles through the skin at various points of the body. Studying acupuncture therapy both in vivo and ex vivo has revealed that during needle manipulation, loose connective tissue under the skin couples and winds to the needle, producing profound deformation and mechanotransduction that could act as a mechanism for the treatment’s therapeutic benefits. In order to study this biophysical phenomenon in a controlled setting, we have constructed a simplified model of acupuncture therapy in vitro. We believe that using connective tissue models in our assay allows unique observations not permitted in previous investigations of acupuncture therapy. Using this system we desire to directly observe the biophysical response of connective tissue to acupuncture needle rotation and determine how the mechanostructural properties of connective tissue permit this unique response using quantitative tools, requiring the development of quantitative tools for analyzing soft tissue deformation. These tools include assessing changes in collagen fiber alignment in deforming gels using polarized-light microscopy and directly measuring tissue displacement by tracking suspended polystyrene beads. We believe that our in vitro tools provide valuable insight towards investigating the role of tissue deformation as a mechanism for acupuncture therapy, as well as demonstrate how utilizing simple image processing techniques creatively can provide valuable biomechanical information in biomedical systems.