August 26, 2005

MEDIA CONTACTS: 
Matt Lindsay: (202) 994-1423; mlindsay@gwu.edu
Richard Sheehe: (202) 994-3631; sheehe@gwu.edu

GW MEDICAL CENTER AND SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCE COMBINE EXPERTISE ON NEW NIH GRANT

Four-Year, $2.8 Million Grant Allows Researchers to Improve Success Rate of Surgery Designed to Help Patients Overcome Voice Disorder

WASHINGTON -- An interdisciplinary partnership between The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Science and the GW School of Engineering and Applied Science will bring together researchers from both schools in response to a unique grant opportunity.  The proposal, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), calls for researchers to utilize computer based tools to improve a surgical procedure that helps patients with a voice disorder caused by vocal cord weakness.

"The project is a perfect marriage of the mechanical engineering and computer science disciplines with medicine," said Dr. Steven Bielamowicz, principal investigator and professor of surgery.

Vocal fold problems can cause a person to have difficulty with voice production, impeding an individual's ability to work and to conduct normal social interactions.  The surgical procedure used to correct this problem and restore a patient's voice - called medialization laryngoplasty - is currently dependant on the surgeon's skills and intuition.  Even for the most experienced surgeons, the procedure fails in about 24 percent of the cases, which requires an additional surgery.

An image-guided procedure will be developed to help the surgeon during the surgery.  "By superimposing the CT data from the patient with the actual larynx of the patient during surgery, we are in essence giving the surgeon X-ray vision," said James Hahn, professor of engineering and applied science, chair of the Department of Computer Science, and director of the Institute for Biomedical Engineering.  "This will allow the surgeon to place the implant much more accurately than is currently possible."

The image-guided system will be tested on cadavers by Raymond Walsh, professor and chair of GW's Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, and his team.  "We propose to use computer simulation of the air flow in the larynx to predict the interaction of air with vocal folds that are responsible for voice production," said Rajat Mittal, associate professor of engineering and applied science in GW's Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.  "This will produce a computer-based surgical planning tool that will reduce the dependency on a trial-and-error process."
 
In the short-term the team hopes to improve the success rate of this surgery, reducing the need for additional surgeries and the associated health care costs.  Their longer-range goals are to answer important questions related to biomechanical modeling and the simulation of voice production and to improve image-guided surgical procedures.  Work on the grant will begin on September 1, 2005.  The grant will provide approximately $2.8 million over four years. 

The grant proposal was generated thanks to funding received by the GW Institute of Biomedical Engineering.  The institute was tapped as one of seven areas of excellence by the GW Board of Trustees, President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Donald R. Lehman.  The additional funding provided by the University facilitated pilot projects used to generate preliminary data for the grant proposal.

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