SBIR/STTR Award attributes
PROJECT SUMMARY Musculoskeletal diseases are common in the United Statesespecially among the elderly and individuals of low socioeconomic statusand they take a large toll on the Nationandapos s overall health statusBone disorders are diagnosed by exploring a patientandapos s medical history and by physical examalongside laboratory testsbonebiopsiesand imaging testsBone imaging tests provide a non invasive way to examine at bone structureHoweverimaging data is often evaluated qualitatively or with operator dependence as opposed to automated or quantitative measurementsThese quantitative measurements are not sensitive enough to detect subtle variations in bone quality associated with early disease progressionWe propose the development of high performancemultimodaland automatedD bone characterization toolswhich are accessible through a web browserA broad range of researchers and clinicians can leverage these tools to obtain high throughputreproducible biomarkers for statistically sensitive research studiesThe system will automatically segment bone and cartilage and quantify biomarkers from the regions of interestThe proposed system will have superior high throughput capabilities over existing bone image analysis suitesand it will provide access to state of the art algorithms for researchers without programming abilitiesIn addition to providing a powerful resource to the research communitywe will commercialize this completestreamlined analytical solution by offering it as an online fee per image processing serviceOur system will be validated by demonstrating that we can detect skeletal deterioration in preclinical studieswhich can potentially lead to new clinical trials for novel therapeutic and diagnostic approaches in humansWe will test the hypothesis that the system can automatically identify osteoarthritis in knee images from the Osteoarthritis Initiative database and differentiate hemophilia in micro computed tomography imagesThe ultimate goal of the proposed project is to lead to better preventive strategies and improved progression monitoring of osteoarthritis and related diseases PROJECT NARRATIVE We propose the development of automatedhigh performanceD bone image characterization toolswhich are accessible through a web browserA broad range of researchers and clinicians can leverage these tools to obtain high throughputreproducible biomarkers for statistically sensitive research studiesThe ultimate goal of the proposed project is to lead to better preventive strategies and progression monitoring for osteoarthritis and related diseases
