Lisa Hobson-Webb, MD, and Kathryn Nightingale, PhD, (Duke Biomedical Engineering) have received a $50,000 award from Duke MEDx to develop a multidisciplinary, imaging technology to effectively and non-invasively examine skeletal muscle.
Across the country, there is a significant, unmet clinical demand for non-invasive, accessible and quantitative measures of muscle injury and recovery. Hobson-Webb and Nightingale will develop a 3D shear wave elasticity imaging system capable of measuring the biomechanical properties of skeletal muscle in an outpatient or physical therapy setting.
The award is one of two projects funded by MEDx’s Biomechanics of Injury or Injury Repair request for proposals. The request asked interdisciplinary teams to address the biomechanics of injury, cellular or tissue response to injury or injury repair, development of biomechanical methods to evaluate cellular or tissue injury or regeneration, injury treatments that involve a biomechanical modality, or biomechanical approaches that help clinical evaluation of injury or recovery from injury.
Funding was made possible by a donor who was inspired by the work of Dr. Lou DeFrate in the School of Medicine Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and the Pratt School of Engineering Department of Biomedical Engineering.
MEDx (Medicine + Engineering at Duke) was formed in 2015 to create and enhance interdisciplinary collaborations between the School of Medicine and Pratt School of Engineering. MEDx fosters the exchange of ideas and creates research opportunities between physicians, engineers, computer scientists, researchers and innovators at Duke University.
The other award recipients this year are Samira Musah, PhD, (Duke Biomedical Engineering) and Rasheed Gbadegesin, MD (Duke Pediatrics) who will examine and manipulate mechanotransduction in kidney cells with the goal of restoring function to damaged human kidneys and providing new strategies for treating kidney disease.