Award Data

City planners and engineers need detailed assessments of public rights-of-way to evaluate existing conditions, determine compliance with draft accessibility guidelines, and plan reconstruction projects. Current assessment methods are inadequate and inefficient due to the time and resources required. This project will develop an automated public rights-of-way assessment process and the measuremen ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Neuropathic pain is a common complication of cancer, diabetes mellitus, viral infections, and other causes. Although physicians currently employ a variety of treatments to manage moderate to severe neuropathic pain, including non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, opioids, tricyclic antidepressants, anti- seizure medications, serotonin-norepinephrine reupta ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Increased routine use of state-of-the-art imaging techniques has resulted in a higher incidence of small incidentally discovered renal masses, benign and malignant. A large proportion of patients with such masses, are within an older, more frail population and for renal cell carcinoma (RCC), 60-70% of patients now present asymptomatically. Treatment recommendat ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The number of archived biological samples is very large and ever growing. Maintaining large collections of these samples is fraught with difficulties arising from inadequate labeling technologies, the inability to automatically locate the samples and a lack of robust connection between the physical sample and archiving software. We propose to develop a system t ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Advances in computational hardware and molecular modeling techniques have revolutionized our ability to simulate electrostatic interactions, which play a fundamental role in the conformational stability, structure, folding and function of biomolecules. One important near-term application of these developments drawing both theoretical and commercial interests is ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Several hundred thousand people in the USA each year require artificial blood vessels, grafts , to be placed in their legs because of failing circulation. Sixty thousand of these patients require artificial prosthetic grafts. Unfortunately, many of the artificial grafts become occluded in just a few years (almost 40 % fail within a year), leading to leg amputa ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Sophisticated ventricular assist devices (VADs) are now routinely used for bridge to recovery, or bridge to transplant in heart failure patients. However, the success of the VADs' applications in adults has not been translated into that in pediatric application, due to the delays in the miniaturization process of these devices. To date, the need of VADs for inf ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): As a continuation of a successful Phase I SBIR, this Phase II application is directed towards the further development of a novel immunocytokine, named 20-2b, for improved therapy of B-cell lymphomas. In the United States, there were 65,980 new cases of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) and 19,500 deaths from this disease in 2009. Of all B-cell NHL, 55% are of the DLBC ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Results of recent Free Electron Laser (FEL) studies have shown that under certain conditions pulsed 6-7 5m radiation can affect scission of soft tissues with unprecedented precision and minimal damage to tissues immediately adjacent to the scission sites. Subsequent clinical work has successfully employed this FEL output in several pilot human neurosurgeries. U ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The clinical problem: Approximately 3,500 people worldwide now undergo heart transplantation every year. Most heart transplant recipients are monitored for the development of organ rejection with a series of endomyocardial biopsies during the first twelve months after operation. This procedure is invasive, painful, and potentially hazardous. There is a clinical ...