BME Graduate Student recieves funding from National Science Foundation

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The Department of Biomedical Engineering wishes to congratulate PhD. candidate Justo Torres-Rodríguez on being awarded a Graduate Research Program Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. This highly competitive award grants recipients $32,000 per year for three years within a five year period. Below is a description of the reseach that will be funded by this award. Congratulations, Justo!

Justo Torres-Rodríguez's Research  

Otitis media (OM) is the most common disease for which children receive medical treatment in the US [1]. Sheer et al explain that although different factors precipitate the onset of OM, Eustachian tube (ET) dysfunction causes the Middle Ear (ME) inflammation to persist long after the initial insult has been resolved [2]. During OM, trans-mucosa gas exchange and an inability to open the ET results in painful sub-ambient ME pressure and inflammation of the ME mucosa. I hypothesize that successful identification of biophysical mechanisms responsible for ET dysfunction, based on sonotubometric measures of patient-specific ET pathology, will allow for improved diagnosis and treatment of OM. Sonotubometry is an acoustic test that quantifies the ET opening phenomena by measuring the amount of sound transmitted from the Nasopharyngeal cavity into the ear canal as the patient swallows. My objective is to use this patient-specific information, in combination with anatomically accurate patient-specific ET COMSOL models, to simulate and evaluate how ET tissue properties influence the efficacy of different therapeutic approaches. The clinical impact of this project is that it will provide an understanding of how several ET properties, which can be measured in clinical practice, influence both the clinical presentation of this disease and the most efficacious therapeutic approach for a given subject.