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 ...

Forgetfulness or memory dysfunction occurs more frequently with advancing age, as well as in situations of routine office environments. Routine office tasks like filing are frequently boring tasks, and the forgetfulness problem is exacerbated when an individual with a proclivity to memory dysfunction is working with time constraints and large volumes of materials. We propose to develop a computer ...

Forgetfulness or memory dysfunction occurs more frequently with advancing age, as well as in situations of routine office environments. Routine office tasks like filing are frequently boring tasks, and the forgetfulness problem is exacerbated when an individual with a proclivity to memory dysfunction is working with time constraints and large volumes of materials. We propose to develop a computer ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the United States and other developed countries. The treatment of cardiovascular disease often involves surgically bypassing occluded segments of blood vessels with human saphenous vein grafts. Approximately 1,000,000 aortocoronary and peripheral revascularizations are performed using human saphenous vein ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The long-term objective of this research is to design and develop a dedicated, imaging guided, minimally invasive, percutaneous axillary sentinel lymph node biopsy system for staging of breast cancer. While axillary lymph node dissection remains the gold standard of care for staging of breast cancer, over 70% of women with small breast tumors who undergo axilla ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The long-term objective of this research is to design and develop a dedicated, imaging guided, minimally invasive, percutaneous axillary sentinel lymph node biopsy system for staging of breast cancer. While axillary lymph node dissection remains the gold standard of care for staging of breast cancer, over 70% of women with small breast tumors who undergo axilla ...

Securement of wheelchairs and other wheeled mobility devices (WMDs) on buses presents safety and human factors problems. Many wheelchairs cannot resist the loads of current securing systems during unusual events. Also, many wheelchairs are not secured properly because securement is difficult. Development of an energy-absorbing and load-limiting strapping system is proposed to reduce the risk of in ...

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 investigator): The goal of Phase II is the continued development of the Comprehensive Pain Assessment System (COMPASS), a self-report battery of questionnaires designed to provide information about both the adaptive significance of a patient's pain problem and the psychosocial concomitants. The COMPASS consists of two components, the CO ...