UT College of Engineering receives $800,000 grant

TYLER — The University of Texas at Tyler recently announced that faculty within the College of Engineering have received National Institutes of Health funding to study signs of opioid exposure in infants. According to our news partner KETK, Premananda Indic, PhD, UT Tyler associate professor of electrical engineering, and Pravitha Ramanand, PhD, UT Tyler assistant research professor of electrical engineering, received an $861,744 subaward to support a University of Alabama at Birmingham project. “There is an ongoing epidemic of opioid use during pregnancy,” said Namasivayam Ambalavanan, MD, principal investigator, a University of Alabama at Birmingham professor and Virginia Walker Jones Endowed Chair in Neonatology. “Babies exposed to opioids before birth often develop neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome (NOWS) and are at higher risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). However, the challenge is to identify such signs early in life.” Pioneering work conducted by the team has identified that patterns of heart rate and breathing as early as the first day after birth can be used to identify infants who later develop signs of opioid withdrawal.

According to the university, Indic and Ambalavanan have collaborated for the past six years on the NIH-funded “PreVENT” project that centered on sleep apnea and slow heart rate in extreme preterm infants, and have now extended their expertise to this different high-risk population. In this five-year opioid study, the investigators will apply advanced data analytics to prospectively define and validate cardiorespiratory patterns. Machine and deep learning methodologies will be used to predict the onset and severity of NOWS, as well
as abnormal sleep-disordered breathing a few months following birth. The results of this research may help with earlier identification of NOWS, facilitating quicker initiation of therapy in infants at high risk, while allowing infants at very low risk to be discharged sooner, according to Indic. With a mission to improve educational and healthcare outcomes for East Texas and beyond, UT Tyler offers more than 80 undergraduate and graduate programs to 10,000 students. UT Tyler recently merged with The University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler (now known as the UT Tyler Health Science Center). Through its alignment with the UT Tyler Health Science Center (HSC) and UT Health East Texas, UT Tyler has unified these entities to serve Texas with quality education, cutting-edge research and excellent patient care. Classified by Carnegie as a doctoral research institution and by U.S. News & World Report as a national university, UT Tyler has campuses in Tyler, Longview, Palestine and Houston.