Biomedical Engineering faculty Dr. Anuradha Godavarty received the National Institute of Health Research Project Grant for her project titled, “Smartphone-based optical scanner to physiologically assess diabetic foot ulcers”. Dr. Godavarty is an Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Director for the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Her work generally focuses on developing low-cost hand-held optical devices for various applications including wound monitoring, cancer therapeutics, and perivascular imaging.
The work she is funded by NIH, is focused on developing and validating a smartphone-based imaging approach – SPOT device – to assess diabetic foot ulcers visually and physiologically across all skin tones and wound features using machine learning algorithms. Dr. Godavarty believes, “Smartphone based imaging technologies have immense potential in telemedicine and remote patient monitoring in diabetes related health care domain.” Long-term, this SPOT device can be used as a smart health tool to pre-screen diabetic foot ulcers with high-risk lesions to clinical care, thus minimizing potential amputations across all racial and ethnic groups.
This is a 4-year R01 grant from NIBIB (National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering) that reaches a total of $2.1 million and involves University of Miami collaborators– Dr. Robert Kirsner (University of Miami’s Dr. Philip Frost Dept of Dermatology & Cutaneous Surgery), as well as various departments and colleges at FIU, including Dr. Ananda Mondal (Knight School of Computing & Information Sciences, College of Engineering & Computing), Dr. Wensong Wu (Mathematics and Statistics, College of Arts, Sciences & Education), and Dr. Charles Buscemi (Nicole Wertheim College of Nursing & Health Sciences).
