dos.cuatro. Beginning away from HVLA-SM

The device was comprised of an electronic feedback control system, a motor, and a lever arm attached to the motor’s shaft (Aurora Scientific, Lever System Model 310)puter-controlled rotation of the motor’s shaft rotated the lever arm. The lever arm was attached to a custom built rotary-to-linear converter which in turn was attached to a manipulandum (see Figure 1) that contacted the back of the cat. The rotary-to-linear converter consisted of a polycarbonate block machined with a narrow slot that received the end of the motor’s lever arm and held two parallel guide posts passing through linear bearings in an adjacent fixed bearing block. The manipulandum consisted of a thin titanium rod (0.2 cm diameter ? 12 cm long) secured at one end into the rotary-to-linear converter and inserted at the other end into a small plexiglass tip. The tip made direct contact with skin overlying the L_six spinous process. The converter transformed the lever arm’s rotary motion to linear motion of the manipulandum.

With the cat lying prone, HVLA-SMs were applied at the L₆ spinous process in a vertical direction, that is, toward ventralward from the back marriagemindedpeoplemeet of the cat. The electronic feedback control system allowed the motor to control either the force applied at the end of the lever arm (force control) or the distance traveled by the end of the lever arm (displacement control). Forces and displacements during the HVLA-SM were simultaneously measured at outputs from the control system.

This new mechanized profile (amplitude versus go out) out of a medically produced HVLA-SM should be around represented by shape of an up-top down page “V” [24–26]. Brand new HVLA-SM’s push phase is portrayed from the rising case of “?” (select HVLA-Texting for the Contour dos). Once the revealed inside the Profile 2, the straight level is short for thrust amplitude (counted just like the used force or displacement) and its particular lateral size represents push stage (mentioned within the milliseconds). Reaching the thrust amplitude is actually always managed linearly that is, in force control brand new pushy force enhanced in the a constant rate, and in displacement control the fresh pushy displacement increased at the a constant speed.

A significant objective to your fresh setup would be to keeps physical contact between the cat’s back and the new manipulandum be like the actual contact anywhere between an effective clinician’s hand therefore the lumbar spine off a patient

One way we did this was to have the manipulandum’s tip make direct contact with the intact skin overlying the L₆ spinous process as previously described. This improved upon earlier studies where the skin had been cut and toothed forceps clamped directly onto the spinous process [10, 11]. The second way was to customize the manipulandum’s plexiglass tip by scaling its contact area with the skin to that used clinically in the lumbar spine. In the human, peak thrust forces are distributed over a relatively circular area between 350 and 1480 mm 2 when the pisiform bone is used to apply an HVLA-SM. We scaled this area but not its shape to the cat using a ratio of heights (from caudal to cranial tip of the articular processes) between the cat and human lumbar vertebra. We took direct measurements from cat and human lumbar specimens. The cat L₆ vertebra is 23 mm in height and the comparable human vertebra (L₄) is 43 mm. The 0.53 ratio was slightly reduced to 0.45. The final scaled surface area was 70 mm 2 . The tip’s shape was rectangular (7 mm ? 10 mm) with a narrow channel (5 mm wide ? 2 mm deep) designed to cradle the sides of the spinous process and help prevent lateral slippage during the HVLA-SM.