Research opportunities supervised by Professor J Geoffrey Chase include:
Email supervisor: geoff.chase@canterbury.ac.nz
Active Insulin Control and Monitoring
Degree Masters or PhD
Project Description Diabetes is a widespread problem reaching epidemic proportions in New Zealand and the world in general. This project looks at a variety of aspects of automating the monitoring and dosing of insulin for Type I diabetics. Specific aspects of this project will address issues of advanced modelling and adaptive control design for the automation of insulin infusion for diabetics.
The project is expected to entail extending current research in this area to employ more sophisticated models that account for greater physiological variation and effects than the current models. More adaptive and model based methods will be examined, including proofs of stability and convergence for existing and developed control methods. It is of particular interest to determine whether there is a truly "optimal" control design method for this non-linear control problem. The project will be scaled to account for the type of degree the student is interested in pursuing.
The project will be require cooperation between the student and the following diverse team of personnel: The Lipids and Diabetes Research Group at Christchurch Hospital and the UoC Applied Maths Group. Interested students have the opportunity to engage in research in a cutting edge area linking silicon technology and physiological processes as well as the opportunity to work developing technology that could significantly impact the quality of life for millions.
Field of Study New field of study.
Funding arrangements Funding is being pursued with the HRC and Insulin Pump Companies but has not yet materialized.
Mechanical Ventilation Modelling and Optimisation
Degree Masters or PhD
Project Description Mechanical ventilation is a commonly applied therapy in critical care to assist breathing and ameliorate the impact of diseases such as ARDS and SARS. This project addresses the growing need for non- or semi- invasive methods of optimising the pressures and other settings for mechnical ventilation - particularly in an adaptive, feedback controlled fashion that accounts for patient variation and changes in patient condition.
Current methods are based on trial and error, and the application of medical experience and intuition - the so-called "art of medicine". The result is extremely variable ventilation protocols that impact the effectiveness of treatment. What we will do in this research is develop simple, minimal models of lung dynamics that include the impact of disease - most notable acute respiratory distress syndromes (ARDS) such as SARS and pneumonia. These dynamic models will allow us to capture a variety of patient conditions. From these results we will determine what to measure and how best to optimise ventilation using that measurement. Clinical trials on critical care subjects will follow successful research results.
The project will require cooperation between the student and the Department of Intensive Care Medicine at Christchurch Hospital, and Dr. Geoffrey M Shaw in particular. Interested students have the opportunity to engage in research in a cutting edge area linking mechanical engineering, dynamic system modelling, and physiological processes -- better known as Biomedical Engineering -- as well as the opportunity to work developing technology that can significantly impact the prospects for millions of patients a year.
Field of Study Biomedical or Bio- Engineering.
Funding arrangements Funding is being pursued with the HRC and a variety of commercial ventures but has not yet materialized.
Sedation-Agitation Sensor for Intubated Patients in the ICU
Degree Masters
Project Description Intensive care unit (ICU) patients are often intubated to help them breathe, and sedated to minimize pain and agitation from the intubation as well as other injuries. Patients that are not sedated enough often become agitated and try to remove the breathing tube causing distress and anxiety that are difficult to control without unnecessary extra sedation.
The goal of this project is twofold
- Create a sensor array to measure patient motion with existing sensor technology
- Correlate and quantify patient motion to existing qualitative agitation scales
The basic premise of this project is that patient motion, and other metrics, are directly correlated to patient agitation. Current measures of patient agitation are qualitative relying on medical staff to make periodic, subjective judgements. The application of modern sensor and signal processing technology presents the opportunity to gather more data and apply it to create a qualitative, far more precise, determination of patient agitation. Success would enable better sedation-agitation modelling as well as a more quantified approach to controlling sedation processes.
This project is being run in conjunction with Dr. Geoff Shaw, M.D. a research anaesthesiologist with the Christchurch Hospital and the Otago School of Medicine. Students who take this multidisciplinary project will be expected to spend significant time understanding the medical systems involved and working in conjunction with Dr. Shaw and medical staff as well as with Dr. Chase on the technology side. This research represents an entirely new area of research for an ambitious Post-Grad interested in leading edge biomedical research with significant human impact.
Field of Study New field of study
Funding arrangements Funding is being developed however there is currently none available.
Modelling and Control of the Sedation-Agitation Curve in ICU Patients
Supervision: Professor Chase and Dr Geoffrey Shaw (Otago Med. - Chch)
Degree PhD
Project Description Intensive care unit (ICU) patients are often intubated to help them breathe, and sedated to minimize pain and agitation from the intubation as well as other injuries. Patients that are not sedated enough often become agitated and try to remove the breathing tube causing distress and anxiety that are difficult to control without extra sedation. Conversely, over, or heavily, sedated patients take significantly longer returning to a conscious state, adding significant cost and time to their hospital stay as well as additional risk due to over sedation.
The primary problem is twofold
- Lack of an adequate model relating agitation and sedation
- Inability of shrinking nursing staffs to consistently understand, dose and treat sedated patients with the minimum necessary sedation, i.e. lack of automatic control.
This project looks at addressing these two problems. The first part is to create a quantifiable sedation-agitation model suitable to covering the majority of patient behaviours in terms of relating sedative concentration to qualitative level of sedation and a quantified level of measured agitation. The second part examines applying control systems technology to this system to obtain more robust and consistent results, and to achieve more minimal levels of sedation to minimize ICU stays and healthcare cost.
This project is being run in conjunction with Dr. Geoff Shaw, M.D. a research anaesthesiologist with the Christchurch Hospital and the Otago School of Medicine. Students who take this multidisciplinary project will be expected to spend significant time understanding the medical systems involved and working in conjunction with Dr. Shaw and medical staff as well as with Dr. Chase on the technology side. This research represents an entirely new area of research for an ambitious Post-Grad interested in leading edge biomedical research with significant human impact.
Field of Study New field of study
Funding arrangements Funding is being developed but currently not available
Physiological Systems Modelling
Degree Masters or PhD
Project Description The last 20 years of research have been about "silicon". The next 20 will be about linking silicon technology to controlling or enhancing physiological function in the human body. To accomplish this task accurate models that capture the essential dynamics of human physiology must be created. This research therefore requires someone interested in both analytical modelling as well as experimental or clinical validation. These models will also be used for creating the fundamental control theory necessary to create new medical therapies and devices to improve patient care quality and decrease its cost to society.
Current research is primarily focused on areas where critical care patients can make the most use. This focus ensures that the outcomes have large or significant potential usage in the medical field. Particular areas of interest include modelling the dynamics associated with
- Cerebral Blood Flow - to minimise the incidence of stroke in surgery or other procedures
- Kidney Function and Dialysis Kinetics - to minimise the cost of treatment and its side effects
- Disease Kinetics in Lung Injury - to predict and control the spread of lung damaging diseases such as SARS in the body
- Cardiovascular Mechanics - to better diagnose and treat cardiac critical care patients.
Clinical trials on critical care subjects would follow successful research results to verify the models and prove any control systems concepts applied.
These projects require cooperation between the student and the Department of Intensive Care Medicine at Christchurch Hospital, and Dr. Geoffrey M Shaw in particular. Interested students have the opportunity to engage in research in a cutting edge area linking mechanical engineering, dynamic system modelling, and physiological processes - better known as Biomedical Engineering - as well as the opportunity to work developing technology that can significantly impact the prospects for millions of patients a year.
Field of Study Biomedical or Bio- Engineering.
Funding arrangements Funding is being pursued with the HRC and a variety of commercial ventures but has not yet materialized.
Structural Health Monitoring and Adaptive Digital Filtering
Degree Masters
Project Description Structural health monitoring is the examination of structures for damage by examining changes in their vibration response to inputs from expected values. This research area is very important for areas, such as New Zealand, that are subject to earthquakes and other damaging excitations. This technique is also heavily employed in the aircraft and manufacturing equipment industries to test for damage before it is visible.
More specifically, given one or more sensors, vibrations resulting from known or random inputs may be analysed to determine the change in model parameters. Adaptive digital filtering techniques are widely used in digital telecommunications and represent a potential means of dealing with this problem in a fashion that is far more easily implemented in noisy, real-time environments than current methods. While the central focus will be on benchmark problems put forward by Civil Engineering Societies the methods developed are expected to generalize to wider ranges of problems.
This project requires students interested in multi-disciplinary research in Mechanical, Civil and Electrical Engineering, taking the useful parts of approaches to similar problems to develop a novel solution using elements from each field as necessary. The approach used is expected to be a mixture of analytical and experimental culminating in trials on a hardware benchmark problem created by ASCE. This research will occur in conjunction with faculty in the Department of Civil Engineering at Texas AandM University and any interested faculty in the Electrical and Civil Engineering Departments at UoC.
Funding arrangements Funding is always being pursued.
Structural Dynamics and Control for Seismic and other Cases
Degree Masters or PhD
Project Description Structural control and mitigation.
Earthquakes and other large disturbances cause a significant and damaging structural dynamic response, often nonlinear in nature. The damage can be substantial at 10-20% of GDP for a large event. The damage to society as jobs are lost when business don’t reopen fully due to structural damage to premises is significant and can last 10-30 years before abating in a given region. Finally, the damage to lifelines, like bridges and energy distribution, can result in making recovery more difficult and further loss of lives or injury.
This project requires students interested in multi-disciplinary research in Mechanical, Civil and Electrical Engineering, taking the useful parts of dynamics and finite element analysis, as well as design and control systems to create new devices and systems to mitigate dynamic response of structures. It is undertaken with our Dept of Civil Engineering and other oversease collaborators. There are also analytical and theoretical studies associated with this topic.
Overall, this project area is about structural dynamics and control systems development, and the use of these and analytical methods to analyse these problems and design creative solutions.
Funding arrangements Funding is always being pursued.