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Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) held its 77th annual meeting on the institute's main campus on Monday, during which officials and scientists presented their latest research to the board of directors and advisory trustees.
The topics included use of hydrogen in transportation, the design of the next generation of satellites — specifically for improvement in weather casting — and the use of artificial intelligence in health care.
The discussion of AI in health care included a focus on how it can be used to treat traumatic brain injury (TBI).
Smell for traumatic brain injury
Kreg Zimmern, a senior research engineer at Southwest Research, discussed Advanced Military Measure of Olfaction (AMMO) used to detect TBIs through a smell test.
"Anosmia is the inability to distinguish smells, or the inability to smell," he explained. "The assessments for this right now are ... objective. They just ask you, 'can you smell something?' which is, turns out, it's a really hard thing to answer."
Anosmia was determined to be an indicator of TBIs, according to the research, and scientists developed a device to detect potential TBIs though that.
"The ammo features were driven by the contingent use in the battlefield. So it's small, it's lightweight, it's waterproof and rugged," Zimmern explained. "This can be used in a ditch, in the dark, under fire or in the clinic. The AMMO kit can reliably identify an anosmia, which is a strong indicator of traumatic brain injury."
The test is not yet approved for use — funding is required and clinical trials. However, Zimmern said the device poses a low safety risk, so the test could be used now if approved by an FDA exemption.
Breath has a fingerprint
Biomarkers in breath tests can also be indicators of TBIs.
Mark Libardoni, staff scientist at Southwest Research, described that everyone's breath is unique, and that creates what he described as a fingerprint for breath.
"You can collect your breath during your normal healthy stage, and you'll get your fingerprint profile," Libardoni explained. "If something happens or you become sick, you can collect your breath and you can look at the profile and start to determine what these biomarkers that are changing, that are being expelled from your body."
The tech Libardoni presented was developed in partnership between SwRI and the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). It used a test in which breath is collected in correlation to a brain injury. Blood is taken before and after the injury occurs. UTSA tests the blood for a biomarker used to detect brain inflammation, and SwRI tests the breath for biomarkers.
"We use machine learning and AI to determine what the biomarkers are that are changing as a function of the brain swelling," Libardoni explained. "Material scientists and engineers are working on small, miniature sensors that are selected just for those biomarkers that we're finding in these breath samples. So the analysis of breath is very rich with information."
To use this tech, researchers are developing a portable handheld device that could test combat servicemembers, athletes and others who are at risk for TBIs — once scientists narrow down and detect the biomarkers that correlate with TBI. The research is still in development.
Helmet redesign
Daniel Portillo, a research engineer at Southwest Research, opened his presentation by joking that he hopes to put the Zimmern and Libardoni out of a job by eliminating TBIs.
"The specific thing that we're focused on is redesigning and improving the helmets within or the padding within military helmets," he explained. "Currently, we are in the middle of a Connect program between the Institute and UTSA, where we are working together to improve the performance of helmet pads."
Portillo's presentation included diagrams of human head surrogates, which replicate the human skull, the brain tissue, the skin, the muscles — all in the head — in different tests.
His research focuses on the padding of helmets, specifically military helmets, but the tech can be applied to sports helmets too, like those used in football.
"Softer pads typically reduce the blunt impact force a little bit better. This is something you would find, again, in those sports helmets. Think a softer kind of foam," Portilllo explained. "[P]ads will actually help reduce the ballistic force. So think rubber. But then the problem becomes, 'well, okay, we have a helmet pad, but we needed to have both of these features.' "
He offered a potential solution: "Our current efforts are designing an inner pad structure that can actually behave in both ways, just like the soft, squishing thumb, but also it can behave like the hard rubber depending on the impact that it's exposed to."
Collaboration
The presenters also discussed collaboration between SwRI and other groups dedicated to treating TBIs.
"There are a lot of groups out there wanting to work on traumatic brain injury, and we think we'll be more competitive and a better resource if we work together rather than separately," Zimmern said. "We want to be able to integrate some of that technology into what we're doing as well. So we're going to be trying to develop an Institute platform technology for traumatic brain injury assessment."
He added that the tech they presented can be used together to collect data to combat TBIs.
"This allows us to find new patterns across multiple tools that are normally not related to each other. That's really one of the big powers of machine learning and AI," Zimmern said.
