Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Conservative estimates suggest that over 2 million people annually in the U. S. alone suffer from ulcers, and the base of those so afflicted is likely to increase in view of an aging population. Mean hospital charges of patients with a primary diagnosis for pressure ulcers were about $22,000 in 1992, a significant cost that will become increasingly difficult to ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) in the environment can cause a variety of physiological problems in animals and humans. Thus, measurement and analysis of EDCs in the environment is very important to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in its Superfund monitoring activities. The investigators have developed a prototype macroarray that works excepti ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): An intraoperative surgical probe using a mercuric iodide radiation detector is proposed. The probe will have the ability to simultaneously measure the 140 keV gamma-ray emission and the 18 keV x-ray emission from Tc-99m. Good energy resolution is necessary for the lower energy x-rays to separate them from the potentially large scatter background. Comparison of ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Cyclotec AMT, Inc. is developing 'non-invasive' transcutaneous electrical stimulators (TENS) that may prove to be viable adjuncts to or alternatives for drugs for management of recent onset "acute" pain. TENS has long been used for "chronic" pain management. The device complexities have made them prohibitive for short-term 'acute' applications; an application ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Trauma is the major cause of mortality in individuals under 45 years of age. Failure to rapidly control hemorrhage leads to inadequate organ perfusion (shock) and is the major cause of death in these trauma victims. Accordingly, portable, non-surgical, hemostasis devices that are practical and easy to implement, and provide for rapid hemostasis in the trauma e ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): An estimated 3.75 billion drug administrations were made to patients in United States hospitals in 1998, of which approximately 10% received their medications through an enteral tube as liquids. This number is growing. Despite the availability of a vast drug pharmacopoeia and sophisticated medication distribution system, institutional care givers still liquify ...

Description (provided by applicant): Today over 80 percent of clinical trials are still conducted utilizing paper forms for data collection. Transcription of data from paper source documents to a central database is expensive and an additional source of error in clinical trials. With the advent of the Internet and low-cost personal computers, custom software has been developed for clinical trials ...

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The objective of this study is to develop a system capable of objectively determining audiogram configurations in newborn infants using auditory steady-state evoked potentials (ASSEP). The system will address the need to obtain frequency-specific hearing threshold information infants less than six months of age in a fast and efficient manner in order to fit hearing aids. Current ABR technology is ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Many cases of sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) likely are caused by interruption of cochlear blood flow (CBF). Disruption of the internal auditory artery during surgical procedures to remove acoustic neuromas (ANs) probab'y account for many cases of postoperative deafness. Also, many cases of clinical SNHL, such as sudden SNHL, are thought to involve reductio ...