Undergraduate researchers publish paper about using optics to study bones

A summer research project is a great way for an undergraduate student to get introduced to research. Oakland University supports many undergraduate research programs. For instance, the Summer Institute in Bioengineering and Health Informatics (SIBHI)—funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation—provided opportunities for many bright and talented students.

Often student research leads to student publications. Megan Bland, Marisol Cortes and Kristin Solt teamed up do a SIBHI project with Professor LianXiang Yang of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Assistant Professor and CBR member Mohammad-Reza Siadat of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. A paper about their results, Stereo Digital Image Correlation for Characterization of Fresh Biomaterials, was published recently in Photonic Therapeutics and Diagnostics VI, which is Volume 7548 in the Proceedings of SPIE (a leading professional organization in optics and photonics). The proceedings contains articles presented at the BiOS SPIE conference in San Francisco, California in January 2010. The paper states that “in this study a whole field, non-contact optical method, Stereo Digital Image Correlation (SDIC), was used to determine the strain distribution and mechanical properties of fresh bone in Phosphate Buffered Saline (PBS) solution. Knowing the whole-surface strain distribution of bone is useful for understanding the effects of normal physiological loading, disease, drugs and aging.”

One interesting feature of the SIBHI program is that is accepts students from both OU and other schools. Megan Bland is a student in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan, Mirisol Cortes is with the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Western New England College in Springfield Massachusetts, and Kristin Solt is with the Department of Mechanical Engineering at OU.