Ming-Shaung Ju, Ph.D.
Department of Mechanical Engineering (National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan)
E-mail: msju@mail.ncku.edu.tw


TITLE:

"In Situ Transverse Biomechanics of Sciatic Nerve"


ABSTRACT:

In the past two decades, the team has been working on the development of prostheses
and neural prostheses for the disable patients and the rehabilitation robots for stroke
patients. One of the key components in a neural prosthesis system is the electrode
implanted upon the peripheral nerves such as the self-spiraled cuff electrodes. For
long-term safety of the patients, there is a need to investigate in situ biomechanical
properties of the peripheral nerve. A rabbit model and a rat model were adopted and
methods of testing the biomechanical properties of the sciatic nerve are developed.

In this talk, an overview of our works on rehabilitation engineering will be introduced
followed by our recent results on applying the quasi-linear -visco-elasticity theory to
the sciatic nerve. A custom-made dynamic testing system that can perform compression
and relaxation without dissecting the nerve will be presented. Based on the anatomy of
the sciatic nerve and the experimental data, elastic and viscoelastic models of the nerves
were fitted and tested. Besides cuff electrode design, the model is utilized to investigate
the effects of diabetic mellitus on transverse biomechanics of peripheral nerves and the
design of nerve conduit for peripheral nerve regeneration. From these researches, we
found the need for further studies of biomechanics from cellular level up to tissue level
and to employ optical coherent tomography (OCT) to observe the deformation of nerve
tissues and that is the current trend in soft tissue biomechanics.