Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sight-threatening diseases, such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD), affect the tissues of the posterior segment of the eye. Though modern classes of biomolecular based drugs are therapeutically useful, drug targeting for prolonged bioavailability to pathological sites within the eye is challenging. Current delivery approaches are invasive and lack control over drug release rates and tissue-specific localization. In this thesis, a device using microneedles embedded in a flexible platform was developed that could potentially overcome these challenges. New methods for microneedle fabrication were developed by co-opting simple chemical etch methods commonly used for optical probe fabrication as an alternative to current complex and expensive photolithographic technologies to produce out-of-plane, high aspect ratio microneedles which are often constrained materially to silicon and metal. Microneedles with repeatable tip and taper sizes were obtained using hydrofluoric acid, an organic phase and fused-silica capillary tubing. Microneedles with 10 um tips were made using single and batch mode methods and were then integrated into poly (dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) for alignment using low cost micromolding approaches offering the same degree of accuracy provided by conventional photolithography<strong>. </strong> Single microneedle-based devices successfully delivered rhodamine intrasclerally, intravitreally, suprachoroidally and to the retina. This is the first demonstration of active delivery to specific spatial regions within the posterior eye at controllable rates using a non-implantable, biocompatible device – with minimal fabrication facilities, equipment and cost. The fabricated device demonstrated a new hybrid approach of coupling a rigid microneedle with a soft and pliable substrate that could conform to biological tissues.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.103 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".