Reissue: RFA-NS-21-023 - The purpose of this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is to encourage investigators to pursue translational activities and small clinical studies to advance the development of therapeutic, and diagnostic devices for disorders that affect the nervous or neuromuscular systems.
Reissue: RFA-NS-21-024: The purpose of this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is to encourage investigators to pursue a small clinical trial to obtain critical information necessary to advance recording and/or stimulating devices to treat central nervous system disorders and better understand the human brain (e.g., Early Feasibility Study).
In recent years, the NIH has awarded over $850M annually to the numerous research institutions and hospitals within the Texas Medical Center (TMC; Houston, TX), producing ever-increasing numbers of biomedical discov- eries.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is the gold-standard method for the detection and diagnosis of brain disease and surgical planning. Neurosurgery is closely guided by preoperative neuroimaging with MRI which can accurately localize and delineate lesions, map functionally critical brain regions, or probe tissue metabolism to guide clinical management. While the preoperative images are regularly consulted in the OR, the surgeon’s ability to navigate with these maps is degraded by tissue deformation and brain shifts that occur during surgery.
The goal of this project is to create two prototypes of a novel live spike sorting system which can be used by investigators to spike sort streams of neural data recorded by multi-channel, high channel and ultra-high channel probes. In most in-vivo extracellular recording conditions, an electrode can pick up neural spikes from several nearby neurons resulting in so-called “multi-unit” activity in the recording trace.
The ability to measure and manipulate local brain circuit activity in living, behaving animals is essential to understanding the complexities of brain function and dysfunction.
Electroencephalography (EEG) measures the brain’s local field potential from the surface of the scalp. This method is useful for studying cognitive processes, neurological states, and medical conditions. Its relative low- cost, ease-of use, and non-invasiveness increase its utility in brain monitoring for both research and medical applications. Unfortunately, the process of acquiring EEG is often not inclusive of all research subjects. EEG typically requires scalp abrasion and application of conductive gels to create a low impedance contact between exposed skin and the electrode tips.
In this SBIR grant proposal, “Ultra-low distortion and noise electronics to enable a clinical MPI imaging platform,” we will develop the RF subsystem for a clinical magnetic particle imaging (MPI) platform to enable three classes of MPI applications: cell tracking, functional imaging, and endogenous contrast imaging.
Whole-brain mapping at the cellular and subcellular levels is crucial to systematically understand brain functions and disorders. Recent developments in tissue transformation techniques, such as CLARITY, SHIELD, MAP, ExM, CUBIC, and DISCO-based methods, have made significant progress towards whole-organ molecular labeling and microscopic imaging by rendering intact tissue chemically permeable and optically transparent.
This Phase II project describes the commercial development of HyperAxon™, highly innovative software for performing automated segmentation, tracing, reconstruction and quantitative analysis of all axonal fibers (with and without signs of acute axonal injury) visible in two- and three-dimensional (2D and 3D) microscopy images of central nervous system (CNS) areas, even those with extremely high axonal fiber density.
