Contributed Papers 2

External ventricular drains (EVDs), drains used to divert cerebrospinal fluid, are a key treatment for controlling intracranial pressure for patients in the neurologic intensive care. One of the most common complications of EVDs is obstruction of the catheter from biological and cellular debris, which requires timely mitigation in order to minimize injury or infection to the patient. This work details the design and testing of a novel Vibration Obstruction Prevention (VOP) system which is an externally attached, mechanical agitator for current EVD treatments. This work consists of the design of the VOP system followed by a vibration characterization study where vibrations produced were measured and validated through benchtop testing using laser doppler vibrometry (LDV). Next, clinically inspired testing was performed to recreate occlusion dynamics in an EVD setup and vibration propagation through the system. Results indicated that mechanical agitation improved catheter patency, but frequency did not have a notable effect on the system's performance. Furthermore, testing found that propagation to the insertion site is minimized with a distal placement of the vibration unit. Collectively, this work presents a novel and easy to use system to improve EVD patency, setting the stage for future work to evaluate the effectiveness of the VOP system in authentic clinical settings.

Jillian Jackson
Saint Louis University

Bio: Jillian Jackson is a senior mechanical engineering student at Saint Louis University with experience in research, product development, and prototyping, focusing on biomedical systems. She works in the Collaborative Haptic, Robotics, and Mechatronics Lab, where she has assisted in developing wearable devices and is currently working on a neurosurgery collaboration to improve cerebrospinal fluid flow in EVDs. She also interned at UT Southwestern, supporting neurological diagnostics through electrical stimulation and improved EEG data collection.

Blood transfusions commonly cause elevated potassium levels in patients due to potassium release from older and dying red blood cells (RBCs). Transfusion-associated hyperkalemia is linked with increasing blood bag age and can cause life-threatening cardiac events. This is especially important in vulnerable populations such as neonates, infants, and children, who lack blood volume and mature compensatory mechanisms for handling electrolyte fluctuations. Currently, healthcare professionals need to weigh this risk when deciding whether to provide or delay the administration of blood, which can be a life-saving measure.

To address this concern and provide safer transfusions, our team is developing an in-line device that will allow healthy RBCs to be transfused into patients by separating them from aging RBCs. This device will prevent aging RBCs from entering the bloodstream and potentially causing a life-threatening event from releasing potassium. Utilizing mathematical principles and targeted design, our team has developed a device that has shown 91% success in passing through healthy, deformable RBCs. This was done by leveraging negative pressure and vibration mechanisms in combination with a filter that requires RBCs to deform. Next steps will include an experimental study that incorporates dead and older RBCs with healthy RBCs to demonstrate the device’s ability to prevent passage of RBCs with decreased deformability.

Ridi Barua
Virginia Tech

Ridi has worked in the biotech startup space for five years as a mechanical engineer, focusing on microfluidic device design, experimental testing, and prototyping electromechanical interfacing systems for microfluidic devices. Currently, he is completing his master’s in Biomedical Engineering through the Carilion Clinic Biodesign Program at Virginia Tech. Through this program, he has shadowed healthcare providers to identify critical clinical needs, including methods to separate healthy red blood cells from dying or dead cells to reduce the risk of potassium accumulation during blood transfusions.

Sarah Scheerer
Virginia Tech

Sarah Scheerer is a second-year master’s student in the Carilion Clinic Biodesign Program at Virginia Tech. As a Biodesign Fellow, she is a part of a program focused on education, innovation, and health opportunity that includes clinical observation and R&D. Sarah received her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Virginia Tech in 2024, with a focus on medical devices. Throughout her education, she has engaged in healthcare professional and engineer collaborations resulting in publications and intellectual property filings.

Mahrukh Siddiqui
Virginia Tech

Mahrukh Siddiqui is a healthcare marketing and innovation professional with a PharmD and MBA, currently pursuing a Master’s in Biomedical Engineering at Virginia Tech. She brings experience in pharmaceutical brand management and commercialization from her time at GSK, where she led portfolio strategy and customer engagement initiatives. Her current work focuses on clinician-driven needs discovery and early-stage commercialization of medical technologies, where she collaborates with health system stakeholders to translate unmet clinical needs into viable product and market strategies.

Full Title: Needle-Orifice Intravenous Oxygenation Device: Cross-Flow and Residence Time Effects on Microbubble Delivery for Hypoxia Treatment
Severe hypoxia remains one of the most critical challenges in emergency and critical care, where conventional lung-based oxygenation or ECMO support can be slow, invasive, or unavailable. To address this, we developed an intravenous oxygenation device that delivers oxygen directly into the bloodstream through microbubbles in saline. In this system, saline and oxygen are compressed up to 100 atm, ensuring complete gas dissolution under Henry’s law equilibrium. When this pressurized mixture is released through 32 orifice holes of 40image.png spaced radially around a needle, it generates a metastable, supersaturated flow where oxygen emerges as micro-scale bubbles. To mimic physiological flow, the needle discharge was introduced into a crossflow driven by a peristaltic pump, and the resulting bubble size distributions were measured for varying flow ratios and residence times. Higher flow ratios produced finer, more uniform bubbles, while increased residence time led to moderate growth from diffusion and coalescence. These findings identify the hydrodynamic conditions necessary to generate safe, dissolvable bubbles for rapid, lung-independent intravenous oxygen delivery. Additionally, these results support the development of a portable intravenous oxygenation device for rapid stabilization of hypoxic patients.

Abdullah Al Mehedi
University of Minnesota

Abdullah Al Mehedi is a Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on multiphase flow, bubble dynamics, and gas–liquid transport in biomedical systems. He develops experimental and computational approaches to study nucleation, growth, and transport phenomena relevant to medical technologies. His current work investigates high-pressure supersaturated oxygen systems that generate nano- and microbubbles for intravenous oxygen delivery aimed at rapidly treating severe hypoxia without relying on lung function. His broader research interests include phase change heat transfer, nucleation kinetics, cryopreservation physics, and biomedical multiphase flows.