Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The most common artificial voice source for post-laryngectomy speech rehabilitation is the hand-held buzzer or electrolarynx (EL). This device is relatively easy to use and enables most laryngectomees to verbally communicate, but with reduced intelligibility and markedly degraded naturalness. In addition, EL speech is often described as robotic and monotone, at ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Since its introduction in the 1960's, fluorescein angiography (FA) has been the gold standard for retinal vascular diagnosis. However, FA is costly, invasive, and time-consuming, which limits its usefulness as a screening tool. As a potential non-invasive alternative to FA for diagnosing retinovascular disease, we have developed an imaging method called ph ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Crystallization, followed by subsequent structure determination, is a major step in understanding the structure- function relationship of macromolecules. Understanding macromolecule structure has become a key part in the development of new pharmaceuticals, and is a major area of NIH research. Crystallization however is also the rate limiting step, despite techn ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Monitoring physiology of individual cardiomyocytes in high throughput has not been reported. The inability to perform high throughput physiological measurements limits many basic and applied studies, including the use of stem cell derived cardiomycoytes in cardiotoxicity testing. Current automated cardiotoxicity tests have poor predictive value because they use ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Preeclampsia, a hypertensive disorder of pregnancy, is a leading cause of maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality around the world, responsible for approximately 76,000 maternal and 500,000 infant deaths per year.As a heterogeneous and poorly understood disorder, its pathogenesis and possible treatments are an area of active research. While the majority o ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Sleep deprivation (SD) occurs universally in modern societies and causes significant social and financial harm. Numerous human and animal studies indicate that various forms of SD are deleterious to mental and physicalhealth. Therefore, SD has been recognized as an unmet challenge to public health. There is increased need to study the effects of different forms ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Congenital heart diseases (CHD) are the most common serious congenital anomalies and the leading cause of death due to birth defects. Clinical practice relying on physical examination of the newborn before discharge from the nursery often misses newborns with critical CHD (CCHD), which can lead to death or long-term morbidities. Using pulse oximetry (PO) can im ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Invasive candidiasis (IC) is one of the most serious threats to patients in a critical setting. With as many as 60,000 cases per year in the U.S., the total cost associated with IC in the U.S. may be as high as 2-4 billion/year. One of the most critical factors influencing patient outcome is early diagnosis. The goal of this project is a rapi and inexpensive i ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overall goal of this study is to develop a head tracking procedure for the automated assessment of hearing in infants using Visual Reinforcement Audiometry (VRA). The head tracking procedure will be incorporated into the Intelligent Visual Reinforcement Audiometry (IVRA) system from Intelligent Hearing Systems Corp. The IVRA system currently provides automa ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The capacity to evaluate the teratoma forming potential of differentiated embryonic stem cell populations represents an urgent need before widespread therapeutic application of these cells is possible. Researchers at Case Western Reserve University and BioInVision, Inc. will join together to create platform technologies for validating existing embryonic stem ce ...