UMBC’s Gymama Slaughter to develop bioreactors that could pause the clock for life-saving organ transplants

UMBC’s Gymama Slaughter will develop a bioreactor to extend the viability of lifesaving human organs as they await transplant through a major new grant from the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command. Funding for the project totals nearly $1.5 million for a period of three years. Slaughter, associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering, will collaborate closely with Warren Grayson and Gerald Brandacher, both associate professors at Johns Hopkins.

Gymama Slaughter, right, with Joel Tyson ’17, chemical engineering, and Zahra Ghassemi M.S. ’17, chemical engineering, in her lab.

The team will create a bioreactor integrating in-line sensors, mechanical stimulator, and blood perfusion system to more accurately and continuously monitor organs as they are transported for transplantation. They will also “develop a system that closely mimic the organ’s natural environment,” explains Slaughter.

Currently, organ and tissue donors typically need to be in close proximity to transplant recipients due to limitations in organ transport. Some organs are only viable for about six hours, and they must be kept at very cool temperatures to remain viable, so the transport process can be a race against time. With technological improvements, Slaughter says, the viability of the organs could be increased to about 36 hours, greatly expanding the distance an organ could travel from donor to recipient, and the likelihood of a successful transplant.

“This interdisciplinary research will enable us to tackle complex organ transplant viability problems to create the next big breakthrough platform technology for extending and monitoring the viability of organs to improve patient care,” says Slaughter. Together, the researchers hope their work will lead to a new era of successful human organ transplantation, saving the lives of wounded soldiers and others in need of transplants in hard-to-reach locations around the world.

Adapted from a UMBC News article by Megan Hanks, photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

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Johns Hopkins University is pleased to host the Explore Hopkins Program (EHOP), Thursday, October 12 through Saturday, October 14, 2017, on its Homewood Campus, in Baltimore, MD.

EHOP is a joint effort between the university¹s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and Whiting School of Engineering. Our goal is to host a small group of students from underrepresented backgrounds who are interested in pursuing doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins. Join us and attend graduate admissions workshops, network with world-class faculty, gain insight from graduate students, and discover all that Johns Hopkins and the larger Baltimore community has to offer. Lodging and meal costs will be covered for all EHOP participants. Reasonable travel costs will be reimbursed.

Eligibility requirements are as follows:

• Strong academic background with a minimum undergraduate 
  GPA of 3.5
• Applications are particularly encouraged from Black/African Americans, Latino/Chicano Americans, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders.
• Preference will be given to juniors and seniors from the Baltimore/Washington, D.C. area, and Mid-Atlantic states.

Interested students must complete the application form by Friday, September 8. Applicants will be notified of decisions by September 18.  

Cardboard Incubator Gives Preemies Better Chance of Survival

“The statistics, especially in lower source environments, are pretty grim: About every 10 seconds a baby dies, and usually it’s due to problems of hypothermia or sepsis,” says Govind Rao, Ph.D., professor and director at the Center for Advanced Sensor Technology at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). “Low birth weight has become increasingly common as women defer childbirth. If you had an inexpensive way to intervene and keep baby warm, it would have a dramatic impact.” Rao added that premature babies born in these environments are also at risk of infection, because the incubators are not always effectively cleaned and sanitized. This means that as one sick baby leaves the incubator, the next baby coming in is highly susceptible to accepting the infection. “That becomes a highly problematic issue leading to high mortality,” says Rao.

Know Your User

Govind Rao and his team of students at UMBC have been committed to improving the odds for preemies and low-birth rate babies in low-resource environments. What started as a class project evolved into the development of a low-cost and disposable cardboard incubator designed to prevent neonatal mortality as a result of preterm birth and/or infection. Rao assigned the students in his sensors class a research project to develop a design for a low-cost incubator that would maintain the baby’s temperature and use as many locally available resources as possible. After the student teams came up with their designs, they took a field trip to India, visiting rural healthcare centers to find out what happens on the front lines.

Read the full article in MedTech Intelligence.

Attention All Undergraduate Researchers!

Have you completed research that you want to refine and publish?

Would you like to be able to put “published author” on your resume?

Would you like professional criticism on your writing from a peer and faculty reviewers?

Submit your paper to the 2018 UMBC Review for consideration. Direct all questions to our editors at umbcreview@umbc.edu.

Deadline: September 15, 2017

Ph.D. Dissertation Defense

Context-dependent privacy and security management on mobile devices

Prajit Kumar Das

8:00-11:00am Tuesday, 22 August 2017, ITE325b, UMBC

There are ongoing security and privacy concerns regarding mobile platforms which are being used by a growing number of citizens. Security and privacy models typically used by mobile platforms use one-time permission acquisition mechanisms. However, modifying access rights after initial authorization in mobile systems is often too tedious and complicated for users. User studies show that a typical user does not understand permissions requested by applications or are too eager to use the applications to care to understand the permission implications. For example, the Brightest Flashlight application was reported to have logged precise locations and unique user identifiers, which have nothing to do with a flashlight application’s intended functionality, but more than 50 million users used a version of this application which would have forced them to allow this permission. Given the penetration of mobile devices into our lives, a fine-grained context-dependent security and privacy control approach needs to be created.

We have created Mithril as an end-to-end mobile access control framework that allows us to capture access control needs for specific users, by observing violations of known policies. The framework studies mobile application executables to better inform users of the risks associated with using certain applications. The policy capture process involves an iterative user feedback process that captures policy modifications required to mediate observed violations. Precision of policy is used to determine convergence of the policy capture process. Policy rules in the system are written using Semantic Web technologies and the Platys ontology to define a hierarchical notion of context. Policy rule antecedents are comprised of context elements derived using the Platys ontology employing a query engine, an inference mechanism and mobile sensors. We performed a user study that proves the feasibility of using our violation driven policy capture process to gather user-specific policy modifications.

We contribute to the static and dynamic study of mobile applications by defining “application behavior” as a possible way of understanding mobile applications and creating access control policies for them. Our user study also shows that unlike our behavior-based policy, a “deny by default” mechanism hampers usability of access control systems. We also show that inclusion of crowd-sourced policies leads to further reduction in user burden and need for engagement while capturing context-based access control policy. We enrich knowledge about mobile “application behavior” and expose this knowledge through the Mobipedia knowledge-base. We also extend context synthesis for semantic presence detection on mobile devices by combining Bluetooth, low energy beacons and Nearby Messaging services from Google.

Committee: Drs. Anupam Joshi (chair), Tim Finin (co-chair), Tim Oates, Nilanjan Banerjee, Arkady Zaslavsky, (CSIRO), Dipanjan Chakraborty (Shopperts)

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