Advancing the Integration of Digital Health Technologies in the Drug Development Ecosystem.

Optimized frameworks for efficient and scalable deployment of digital health technologies (DHT) are needed to address existing bottlenecks and unlock the opportunities for remote monitoring and operationalizing decentralized trials. DHTs offer immense potential opportunities for transformation in drug development by providing remote, high frequency, longitudinal insights into physiological processes, and how participants feel and function. Currently, DHT-based drug development tool-related efforts have yielded valuable insights into effective practices and areas that need improvement.

Simulation of Conducted Responses in Microvascular Networks: Role of Gap Junction Current Rectification.

Objective: Local control of blood flow depends on signaling to arterioles via upstream conducted responses. Here, the objective is to examine how electrical properties of gap junctions between endothelial cells (EC) affect the spread of conducted responses in microvascular networks of the brain cortex, using a theoretical model based on EC electrophysiology.

Methods: Modeled EC currents are an inward-rectifying potassium current, a non-voltage-dependent potassium current, a leak current, and a gap junction current between adjacent ECs.

Cortical microvascular blood flow velocity mapping by combining dynamic light scattering optical coherence tomography and two-photon microscopy.

Significance: The accurate large-scale mapping of cerebral microvascular blood flow velocity is crucial for a better understanding of cerebral blood flow (CBF) regulation. Although optical imaging techniques enable both high-resolution microvascular angiography and fast absolute CBF velocity measurements in the mouse cortex, they usually require different imaging techniques with independent system configurations to maximize their performances. Consequently, it is still a challenge to accurately combine functional and morphological measurements to co-register CBF speed distribution from hundreds of microvessels with high-resolution microvascular angiograms.

Simulation of oxygen transport and estimation of tissue perfusion in extensive microvascular networks: Application to cerebral cortex.

Advanced imaging techniques have made available extensive three-dimensional microvascular network structures. Simulation of oxygen transport by such networks requires information on blood flow rates and oxygen levels in vessels crossing boundaries of the imaged region, which is difficult to obtain experimentally. Here, a computational method is presented for estimating blood flow rates, oxygen levels, tissue perfusion and oxygen extraction, based on incomplete boundary conditions.