Maternal, Newborn, and Adolescent Health

Ana Namburete of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom will develop a computational tool called Autodate that identifies physical features of the fetal brain from a routine ultrasound image to automatically estimate gestational age at any stage of pregnancy. Determining accurate gestational age is important for healthy pregnancy. However, ultrasound, which is the most accurate technique, can only estimate gestational age when used during the early stages of pregnancy by a trained sonographer, who are often absent in low-income settings.

Zilma Reis of Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil will develop a portable device to measure epidermal properties of the skin and evaluate its ability to determine gestational age in newborns. The skin epidermis is known to change during fetal development. They will exploit a non-invasive optical technique called photoelectric plethysmography that characterizes a material by analyzing its effect on the properties of an LED light shone on it.

William Fifer of Columbia University in the U.S. is developing a non-invasive method to measure heart rate and heart rate variability in the fetus during pregnancy as a window into brain function to help warn of emerging brain abnormalities. They aim to produce charts of brain development beginning during pregnancy and continuing into early childhood that can be used in limited-resource settings for monitoring child health.

Robert Habib of the American University of Beirut in Lebanon will determine whether measuring the patterns of heart rate and breathing rate over time in infants reflects the maturity of the autonomous nervous system and thereby the extent of brain development. The autonomous nervous system controls complex physiological rhythms such as the variability of heart rate over time. These rhythms can be measured non-invasively and will be compared between ten full-term and ten preterm infants measured at birth and every six weeks until 56 weeks, and under different stimulating conditions.

Peter von Dadelszen of St George's, University of London, in the United Kingdom will develop a simple, smartphone-based mobile ultrasound device that can be used by untrained healthcare professionals in low-resource settings to determine gestational age by measuring the diameter of the fetal cerebellum. Accurate dating in pregnancy is important for the health of the mother and child. They will develop an automated image analysis protocol for smartphones that can recognize and measure the fetal cerebellum and an associated application that then estimates gestational age.

Andrew Alexander of the University of Wisconsin in the U.S. will analyze the relationship between the numbers and types of microbes found in the gut (microbiome) with brain and cognitive development in infants. They hypothesize that cognitive performance such as motor control and visual processing may be modulated by changes in the microbiome, which in turn may predict functional and structural changes in the brain.

Nishant Kumar of Embryyo Technologies Private Limited will develop a head scanner that can determine the weight and volume of the brain of a newborn to help monitor health. Current methods rely on expensive or complex techniques that require trained staff. They will develop a portable imaging scanner and a mattress that can measure the weight of the head, and use them to render a 3D mesh volume template of the head. This template can then be used to compute brain volume and weight by subtracting known volumes of bone and dermal tissues.

Paul Albert of Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in the U.S. will use a modeling approach to help clinicians with different resources better estimate gestational age, which is critical for monitoring maternal and child health. Gestational age is currently estimated using ultrasound, which is often unavailable in low-resource settings, or the date of the last menstrual period and external measurements of the uterus, which can be imprecise. The timing of these measurements during pregnancy also influences the accuracy of the estimate.

Mads Melbye of Statens Serum Institut in Denmark will analyze the metabolic changes that occur in women over the full course of pregnancy to help identify signatures that could diagnose disease or predict gestational age. They will use liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry to measure the plasma levels of a broad range of metabolites in 30 pregnant women every two weeks. They will also collect samples for future analyses to profile the types and levels of other molecules and microbes at different stages of pregnancy.

Joseph Culver of Washington University in St Louis in the U.S. is developing a portable, optical neuroimaging technology (high-density diffuse optical tomography [HD-DOT]) to monitor the effects of malnutrition on brain development in young children in low-resource settings. During the first ten years of life, the brain develops many skills such as visual and language processing, and has unique nutritional requirements.