Joshua Deal, a student in the University of South Alabama Basic Medical Sciences Graduate Program, recently received a Predoctoral One-Year Fellowship award from the American Heart Association.
The grant will allow Deal to research hyperspectral imaging as a novel method to classify atherosclerotic plaque. Deal said although there are techniques that can detect the plaques, they are slow, inefficient and nonspecific, and some require a potentially harmful contrast agent.
Together, Dr. Thomas Rich, professor of pharmacology at USA College of Medicine, and Dr. Silas Leavesley, professor of chemical and biomedical engineering at USA, and their lab students have been working to develop a new imaging technique known as excitation-scanning hyperspectral imaging. Hyperspectral imaging is the process of subjecting an object to large portions of the electromagnetic spectrum in small segments and collecting the resulting spectral information in order to determine what that spectral fingerprint is. This technique may allow a user to identify individual molecular components in a given sample quickly, efficiently, with great specificity and without any need for contrast agents.
The imaging may also be able to find plaques that have already begun to build and determine the type of plaque, its likelihood to rupture and any additional damage the plaque has caused. Contingent on the sensitivity of the technique, Deal said they may also be able to identify sites that could develop into problem areas in the future.
Deal said the biggest challenge with his research will be the patient-to-patient variability. No two individuals have the exact same distribution of molecules, so they will have to identify what the spectral images will look like at each disease stage and the bounds for normality for each of those stages. Deal said this compounds the fact that what they define for animals may not be sufficient when applying the findings to humans.
“The award is for one year, but an engineer’s device is never truly optimized,” Deal said. “The one year timeline should provide great insight into the feasibility of the project. If it works as well as we think it will, this line of research will continue for the foreseeable future.”
Though majority of the grant will pay Deal’s tuition, stipend and lab materials, he plans on using a small portion to attend the Photonics West conference to present his findings and gain useful feedback to improve his research.
Deal said he would like to thank a host of people who contributed to his receiving this grant: “My mentors, Silas Leavesley and Tom Rich, are fantastic editors and sounding boards, and they generate ideas at an incredible rate; the rest of my dissertation committee, Troy Stevens, Mark Taylor, David Weber and Dhananjay Tambe, have asked several difficult questions that guided the evolution of this project; Dr. Mary Townsley and Dr. Donna Cioffi teach a class designed to help students write grant applications, and a lot of my better edits came directly from that classroom; Dr. Wiltz Wagner and Ivan McMurtry teach a class designed to help students refine and communicate their ideas clearly, and I used several discussions from that class in my grant application; our lab technician Andrea Britain who helped me find and set up various research components; and I would be completely lost in all the paperwork without Judi Naylor and Jennifer Collins. Thank you all for your contributions. Without each of you, this would not have been possible.”
The American Heart Association has funded more heart disease and stroke research than any organization outside the federal government, thanks to the generosity of donors and supporters.
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