Zhongjun Wu
University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD·Biomedical Engineering
Heart pumps and artificial lungs keep many patients with severe heart or lung failure alive. Ventricular assist devices (VADs) are implanted pumps that help a failing heart.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
ventricular assist device
extracorporeal membrane oxygenation
cardiopulmonary bypass
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Nov 2027
What they work on
- Characterize how high mechanical shear stress changes neutrophil structure, rolling and adhesion, and surface markers, and quantify how structural damage scales with stress levels found in VADs and ECMO.
- Assess white blood cell profiles and dysfunction in sheep supported by continuous-flow VADs run at low and high shear stress settings.
- Explore the mechanisms by which high mechanical shear stress causes structural changes in neutrophils relevant to VAD and ECMO therapy.
- Develop a new platelet activation model based on activation-driven shape changes, and link it to computational fluid dynamics simulations to predict platelet activation, receptor shedding and adhesion to collagen, vWF and fibrinogen.
- Validate the CFD models with lab experiments and a sheep study on VADs and ECMO, using sheep-specific blood properties, device geometry and operating conditions.
More about the research
Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) oxygenates blood outside the body. Most of these devices use a rotary pump, in which a fast-spinning impeller moves blood. The spinning creates strong mechanical forces, called shear stress, that can damage blood cells. Patients often suffer infections, clots and bleeding as a result. Both projects study how these forces injure blood cells and how to design gentler devices. One project focuses on white blood cells and infection. The other uses computer modeling of platelets, the cells that drive clotting.
Why it matters
Infections, clots and bleeding are common and often life-threatening complications for patients on heart pumps, ECMO and cardiopulmonary bypass. By measuring how pump forces damage white blood cells, and by creating tools that predict platelet injury, this work could help engineers design less damaging devices. It could also help clinicians manage patients after surgery more effectively.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
David W Schmidtke
University of Texas at Dallas, TX·Biomedical Engineering
Measure pre-implant leukocyte profiles and plasma biomarkers in advanced heart failure patients and test whether these signs of a compromised inflammatory response predict infection after VAD implantation.
Yuncheng Du
University of Houston, TX·Engineering·Early-career
Develop machine learning methods that find the symptom "fingerprints" of faults directly from data, enabling real-time diagnosis of ventricular assist device problems such as thrombosis and suction.
Hosam Fathy
University of Maryland, MD·Biomedical Engineering
Develop a multi-functional fiber-optic sensor that measures dissolved oxygen and carbon dioxide, temperature and pressure in perfluorocarbon liquid circulated through the abdomen.
The school
University of Maryland, Baltimore: 23 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 79 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.