Pegah Safavi, a Ph.D. candidate in the F. Joseph Halcomb III, M.D. Department of Biomedical Engineering and member of the Biomedical Optics Lab, received the Director's Award in the Von Allmen Center for Entrepreneurship (VACE)'s 1-minute Research Poster Pitch Competition at the Clinical Center for Translational Science (CCTS) Spring Conference, held earlier this month.
This year's CCTS Spring Conference theme was "Pioneering Pathways: Innovative Trial Design in Translational Science" and hundreds of researchers, clinicians, staff, students and community members shared their research to build and foster collaborations beyond the lab.
The VACE Research Poster Pitch Competition is a segment of the CCTS Spring Conference that highlights University of Kentucky innovations by having 22 healthcare researchers pitch their posters in 1-minute for a chance to win prize money for their groundbreaking work. Prizes were awarded for first, second and third place and one Director's Award.
Presenters were evaluated by a panel of judges on the clarity of the presentation and the potential of the research to create new therapies. This year's panel included fellow biomedical Ph.D. candidate and 2023 winner of VACE's Entrepreneurs Bootcamp 1.0 Accelerator, Madison Bates.
“Being asked to help judge the 2025 Von Allmen Poster Pitch competition at the CCTS Spring Conference was an incredible opportunity. It was inspiring to see such a wide range of ideas and research being shared," said Bates. "The participants did a fantastic job of simplifying complex topics and making their work accessible. It was clear that a lot of thought and effort went into each presentation, and I feel lucky to have had the chance to be a part of it.”
Safavi received $500 in prize money for her poster, "Continuous Monitoring of Cerebral Blood Flow and Oxygenation Responses to Intermittent Hypoxia in Neonatal Rats," which illustrated her work developing a low-cost wearable sensor for continuous monitoring of multiple cerebral hemodynamic parameters.
Poster: "Continuous Monitoring of Cerebral Blood Flow and Oxygenation Responses to Intermittent Hypoxia in Neonatal Rats"
Background: Intermittent hypoxia (IH) may result in hypoxic/ischemic stresses on the brains of preterm neonates. To address the need for wearable techniques, we adapted an innovative, fiber-free, wearable diffuse speckle contrast flow-oximetry (DSCFO) device for continuous monitoring of both cerebral blood flow (CBF) and oxygenation in neonatal rats.
Methods: A miniaturized DSCFO probe was assembled consisting of two small laser diodes as focused-point and a tiny NanEye camera to detect spatial fluctuation of diffuse laser speckles for CBF, and light intensity attenuations for cerebral oxygenation measurements, including oxy- and deoxy-hemoglobin concentrations ([HbO2] and [Hb]). The DSCFO probe was attached gently to the head of neonatal rats (7 days old) under 1.25% isoflurane anesthesia. Neonatal rats in the IH group received repetitive transient hypoxia-hyperoxia challenges (10 cycles of 2-minute 8% O2 in N2 and 2-minute 100% O2), while the sham group underwent a 10-minute normoxic baseline monitoring.
Results: The IH group (n = 8) demonstrated significant increases in CBF (1.268% ± 0.767, p = 0.041) and [HbO2] (3.346% ± 1.946, p = 0.003), and a significant decrease in [Hb] (0.98% ± 2.340, p = 0.018) during the last 2 minutes of recovery. In contrast, the sham group (n = 6) exhibited minor variations in CBF, HbO2, and Hb over the monitoring period.
Conclusions: This study demonstrated the feasibility of DSCFO as a low-cost wearable sensor for continuous monitoring of multiple cerebral hemodynamic parameters. The findings underscore the importance of multi-parameter measurements for gaining deeper insights into cerebral regulation during IH events.
