Award Data

Magnetic Resonance Imaging data needs to be calibrated using a universal standard. NIST and the ISMRM SQRM committee have developed the NIST/NIST MR phantom. The group had two phantoms manufactured to their specifications and these phantoms have been imaged at numerous imaging facilities. Sigma-K now proposes to develop a complete manufacturing method that will produce 50 MRI phantoms. These phant ...

Sepax Technologies, Inc. has identified a new type of anoin-exchange resin which separates single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) with >80% recovery yield and resolves in a single pass the chiral tubes of (6,5) well from commercial SWCNT starting materials by Chromatography. Improvement and scale up of the targeted resin production will facilitate the separation of chiral nanotubes for the academic ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop a highly innovative, thermoelectric, microfluidic DNA sequencing method for mutation detection (e.g., SNPs) for applications in personalized medicine. The overall objective is to optimize operational parameters and microfluidic device design variables to overcome three factors that limit the accuracy of the sequenci ...

This Small Business Innovative Research SBIR Phase I project will use statistical analysis of historical medical records to create families of language models for each section of the traditional medical note and switch lexicons in and out of the automatic speech recognition (ASR) in real time based on the contextual position within the narrative note. Current speech recognition methods use a singl ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to develop a commercial nanofluidic chip for the rapid identification of epigenetic marks on individual molecules. The instrument will dramatically improve existing methods of epigenomic analysis by removing two major limitations of the current technology. The proposed device will enable automated quantification of multiple epigen ...

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop a novel ion gate membrane with controlled pore size for redox flow battery. Redox flow battery is one of the most promising electric energy storage (EES) technologies. However, the cost of the state-of-the-art (SOA) membrane used in such battery has to come down dramatically in order to reach the overall system cost target for EE ...

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop a novel nano-scale process for synthesizing sulfur infused carbon composite cathode materials to produce high-energy density lithium-sulfur (Li-S) secondary batteries with a high rate of charge/discharge and extraordinarily long cycle life. Phase I research objectives include, (1) develop a process suitable for making large quant ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses global energy concerns by enabling reduced dependence on energy derived from fossil fuels. A major limitation of many renewable energy sources is the intermittent nature of the source, such as solar or wind. As the percentage of energy applied to the grid from these sources grows, energy storage systems must be developed to s ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will allow children to improve their visual motor skills and handwriting through the use of a new, innovative haptic-based handwriting training technology. The proposal will address the following intellectual challenges: First, a low cost haptic workstation system which costs below $1,500 will be developed making haptics a practical sy ...

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will focus on the development and scale-up of a new process for fabricating probe tips for atomic force microscopy (AFM). In AFM, images of surfaces with atomic-scale resolution are created by rastering a probe across the surface. The probe itself consists of a tip (which interacts with the surface) and a body (which supports the tip and prov ...