Biweekly Meeting of Cleveland Clinic Core Team

Date: August 01, 2017

Time: 10:30 AM EST

Means: In person meeting

Attendees:

1. Ahmet Erdemir
2. Snehal Chokhandre

Agenda:

1. Discuss ongoing action items from the last meeting.
2. Discuss progress of tissue testing protocol evaluation.
3. Discuss segmentation progress.
4. Decide ongoing action items for the next meeting.
5. Other.

Ongoing Action Items:

• Ahmet
  • Complete reviewing the drafts of data manuscripts.
• Snehal
  • Continue filling in the dashboard for tissue testing reproducibility.
• All
  • Continue segmentation based on commitments listed in the Roadmap.

Notes:

1. Discuss immediate action items from the last meeting.
   • Ahmet did not have any progress on reviewing the drafts of data manuscripts. Progress on tissue testing and segmentation were discussed as part of agenda items summarized below.
2. Discuss progress of tissue testing protocol evaluation.
   • Snehal conducted confined compression tests for cartilage using the 3 mm thick filter. The expectation was that there would be less instability and tilting of the filter resulting in more uniform data (no abrupt jumps). The indenter used had a 3 mm diameter head for covering as much of the filter surface as possible without risking running into compression chamber walls. The data still exhibited some spikes at lower strains but overall the behavior has improved.

   • The behavior for the sample from the 48 years old donor appeared to be repeatable (<9% error). The behavior of the samples from 78 years old donor was however inconclusive. Of the two samples tested, the first one had vastly varying behavior (with no definite trend), and the second sample had test 1 and 3 fairly repeatable but test 2 showing much higher forces. The cartilage strip from which the two sample were taken for the 78 yr old specimen appeared as degenerated. Snehal thinks the large variations might be mostly due to the tissue itself. Since one specimen each for representing old and young population was not enough, Ahmet suggested a separate study with 10 specimens in each age group to conclusively make predictions / assertions about the repeatability based on specimen age.

3. From the grant goals perspective, Ahmet thinks it may be better to have repeatability data collected for each sample. This will dramatically increase the burden of testing. Therefore, it may be more feasible to focus on one knee specimen picked based on MRI quality and joint testing data. Essentially, samples tested from one specimen multiple times (preferably 5) for a total of 150 tissue tests done for the chosen specimen (30 tests/specimen normally). The rest or some of the 7 remaining specimens may be tested one or multiple times depending on the availability of time and resources. The confidence in the tissue mechanical testing data will be higher if performed multiple times and show good repeatability, even if it is just one specimen and will be very useful for specimen specific model development.
4. Snehal has come across only one study so far that addressed the repeatability of experimental procedures for ligaments. This needs to be further explored.
5. Snehal will focus on repeatability tests for other tissues for the 48 yr old specimen this month and by the end of August Snehal and Ahmet will make a decision on how to proceed in concert with the grant's goals.
6. Discuss segmentation progress.
   • Snehal has segmented bones for oks006 and oks007 following segmentation specifications. Her goal is to complete all segmentation by the end of 2017.
7. Decide immediate action items for the next meeting.
   • See Ongoing Action Items above.
8. Other.
   • Snehal attended the Snorkel workshop at Stanford University. The Snorkel platform is used for rapid development and modeling of training sets useful for information extraction from unstructured data. The goal was to be able to use the machine learning platform to extract material properties for various tissues from scientific literature. Snehal thinks that obtaining the initial development set manually might cover most of the relevant literature and Snorkel may not be necessary (due to limited literature). She will however continue to explore the platform and learn to use it effectively for other applications.