In his new post on Monster Models, Ben Recht explains why systems physiology modeling is so hard, and why just leaning harder into standard engineering principles cannot possibly be the…
Author: Zach Danziger
Faculty at Emory University department of rehabilitation medicine - division of physical therapy and biomedical engineering.
The Missing (Computational) Link
A powerful technique for generating insights into physiology is to mathematically express what we know about it, then to simulate it in a computer. With the mathematical expressions in hand…
The Case for, and Path to, a Mathematical Model of Urinary Tract Function
Imagine, if you would, a future where your favorite local urologist could tell you how many milliliters your bladder will void two years from now (given the details of your…
The Simple-As-Possible Approach to Lower Urinary Tract Simulation
“What I cannot build, I do not understand.” – Richard Feynman Since I go around pretending that I know how control of the lower urinary tract (LUT) works, surely I…
Very Simple Simulation of Very Simple Neurons
The fundamental unit of the brain is the neuron, and the computational essence of a neuron is adding up blips from neurons it listens to then “deciding” whether to issue…
More Success with Less Control in BCI Cursor Tasks
Intracortical brain-computer interfaces (iBCI) read in neuron activity and use it generate useful actions, potentially giving paralyzed users control of a device. A common goal is to establish brain control…
The Impossibly Incongruous Cursor Control Task
The canonical mind-control task is to operate a thought mediated computer cursor to hit targets on a screen (that’s true for brain-computer interfaces anyway, but maybe not for Jedi). The…
Negative Volume: A Red Flag for Cystometry
To assess bladder health we need to know (among other things) how well it can empty. We quantify this via the voiding efficiency (VE), which is the fraction of urine…
How Does the Bladder “Decide” When to Pee?
The lower urinary tract is orchestrated by an intricate web of harmonizing reflexes that act constructively to help you pee effectively (or to not pee effectively). [See Fowler and de…
The Need for Ethical Structure in Biomedical Research
Academic biomedical scientists don’t really need formal ethical guidelines because they’ve already committed themselves to working for the public good. After all, academics would be in a different (more lucrative?)…