Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): We hypothesize that for a class of dopamine transporter SPECT agents, an automated software processing package can be developed, which will objectively yield striatal quantitative uptake values for evaluating Parkinson's disease (PD) diagnosis and progression. This fully automated and Objective Striatal Analysis (OSA) package will be able to evaluate subjects r ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Arterial spin labeling (ASL) has proven its ability to non-invasively measure cerebral blood flow (CBF). However, widespread use of this promising technique has been prevented by its long acquisition time due to the inherently image low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Recently, it has been shown that the use of 3D instead of 2D 'single-shot' sub-second imaging se ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a devastating inflammatory and neurodegenerative disorder of the central nervous system (CNS). Currently, there are no effective treatments for Primary Progressive forms of MS (PP-MS) and more than half of Relapsing Remitting forms of MS (RR-MS) fail to respond to existing therapies generating a critically unmet medical need. The ulti ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In spite of many seemingly positive trends in U.S. educational settings, many children are still not succeeding in school (Powers, 2005), and school failure is strongly associated with race/ethnicity and SES. School success is a vital protective factor against health risk behaviors in adolescence. Addressing threats to school success in adolescence is imperativ ...

We propose to deliver a system prototype based on the Adaptive Storage Network (ASN) architecture developed in Phase 1 of the SBIR, in order to demonstrate that a fully-distributed self-organizing approach can meet the needs of scalable storage repositories for the NGA and other governmental and large-enterprise infrastructures. The goal of this project is to make data simply and transparently acc ...

PROJECT SUMMARY Chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN) is a debilitating side effect of many first-line chemotherapeutic drugs. Depending on the specific drug and dose regimen, CIPN can afflict between 20-85% of cancer patients receiving these drugs at standard doses and nearly 100% of patients at high drug doses. Many patients with CIPN experience neuropathic pain, and there are no FDA ...

Project Summary Otitis media (infection of the middle ear space) is one of the most common diseases of childhood. Myringotomy with tympanostomy tube (TT) insertion is the most common operation performed on children in the United States. Otorrhea is the most common complication following tube insertion and can occur in up to 17% of ears receiving TT and is often associated with active infection. Cu ...

The assistive exo-skeletal footwear promises to help people regain activities of daily living and to resume and maintain full employment by reducing load on the forefoot, reducing fall risk and augmenting foot propulsion that was lost due to foot amputation, ulceration and claudication. Because the exoskeleton will be inserted into diabetic footwear, it carries the risks associated with use of tha ...

Project Summary / Abstract A variety of hazardous compounds continue to pose serious and widespread risks to public health and safety in the United States. Organic compounds, in particular, such as chlorinated solvents, hydrocarbons, disinfection byproducts, pesticides, polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and other xenobiotic (not naturally occurring) organic chemic ...

AbstractIn this project, we present EyeMark, a system with advanced longitudinal image anal- ysis tools for automated computation of biomarkers for diabetic retinopathy (DR) using retinal fundus images. Specifically, we have developed tools for computation of microan- eurysm (MA) appearance and disappearance rates (jointly known as turnover rates) for use as a biomarker in quantifying DR progressi ...