MATHEMATICAL MODELING OFFERS INSIGHT INTO THE HEALTH OF AIRCRAFT AND PEDIATRIC CARDIAC PATIENTS

C. “Nat” Nataraj, PhD, Mechanical Engineering professor and director of the Villanova Center for Analytics of Dynamic Systems, is an expert in developing mathematical models to predict the performance of engineering systems, whether those systems are mechanical or human. In the past year, he completed one project and began another that combine nonlinear science and machine learning to divine the underlying dynamics for analysis, diagnostics, prognostics and health management.

ACCELERATING FATIGUE TESTING

Together with Mechanical Engineering Professor and Department Chair Sridhar Santhanam, PhD, Dr. Nataraj has completed phase one of a $125,000 NAVAIR (Naval Air Systems Command), Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) project with Global Technology Connections, an Atlanta, Ga., company. While STTR awards typically are led by those working in industry, given his expertise, Dr. Nataraj was named lead on “Systematic Fatigue Test Spectrum Editing Using Wavelet Transformations.” The project’s objective was to economize and reduce the time consumption of fatigue testing, the method by which aircraft companies test aircraft parts under varying loads to determine structural behavior.

Dr. Nataraj explains that, ideally, a fatigue test should exactly reproduce the loading conditions experienced by a given component or part during the entirety of its service life. “However,” he says, “current methods make it prohibitive to run a fatigue test in this manner.” In response, Dr. Nataraj’s team, which included postdoctoral researcher Mohammad Mohseni, PhD, developed an algorithm to predict the viability of aircraft parts through data gathered from just a few loads. He reports, “We achieved over 90% acceleration of the testing process while maintaining substantially equivalent fatigue damage and representative failure modes.”

IMPROVING PEDIATRIC CPR PERFORMANCE

In recent years, CPR quality monitoring defibrillators have improved in-hospital CPR performance (and survival outcomes) for adults by providing real-time feedback on mechanical variables such as chest compression depth and rate. Unfortunately, that same technology is limited for children, and each year cardiac arrest claims more than 2,000 young lives. Given the association between CPR quality and outcomes, new methods to monitor pediatric CPR performance are needed to improve the care of this vulnerable population. In collaboration with researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Dr. Nataraj is working on physiologic-directed (versus guideline-directed) CPR, a promising technique that uses the patient’s blood flow response—measured non-invasively via pulse oximetry—to guide the ongoing resuscitation effort. The National Institutes of Health has awarded the team $1.22 million ($277,467 to Villanova) for a three-year study on the “Validation of Physiologic CPR Quality Using Noninvasive Waveform Analytics (CPR-NOVA).”