Mona Jarrahi, the Department Vice Chair of Graduate Affairs in the UCLA Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, was announced as a winner of the Catalyzing Pediatric Innovation Grant (CPI).
The grant was awarded to five winners who worked on projects to improve care for infants and children. Jarrahi collaborated with Jose A. Pineda and Najmedin Meshkati, both professors at USC, to develop a terahertz scanner for pediatric vascular access. The venture addresses the difficult procedure of providing intravenous (IV) access to children by using the latest terahertz imaging technology developed in Jarrahi’s research group.
Jarrahi has dedicated much of her career to research on terahertz technology, aiming to use terahertz portion of the electromagnetic spectrum for a variety of applications. Regarding its use for IV access, she explained, “Techniques based on lower wavelengths have limitations, in that they cannot penetrate deep in the tissue.” Terahertz may be the next step in changing that, as it can pinpoint areas in the tissue that other techniques are unable to reach”.
Using funds from the grant, Jarrahi and her collaborators plan to develop a prototype terahertz camera that is faster than current terahertz imaging systems, which tend to be slower in capturing images that can be critical to providing efficient IV access. Jarrahi explained, “When you want to do IV access in a pediatric patient, you want it to be fast.” IV access in children can be difficult given the size of their veins, but Jarrahi’s technology aims to address this challenge.
Challenges such as these are precisely the type that the CPI rewards its winners for approaching. Juan Espinoza, Director and Principal Investigator of the West Coast Consortium for Technology & Innovation in Pediatrics (CTIP), said in a statement, “Designing pediatric-specific products that change and grow with a child is complicated…. The CPI grant provides funds to help founders address these obstacles and provides a platform of services to help guide the advancement of medical devices for pediatric patients.”
Though Jarrahi’s project focuses on the pediatric field, she looks forward to the prospect of using terahertz technology to address the needs in other areas, including astrophysics, biomedical sensing, communication, industrial quality control, and agriculture: “Although most of the work in my group is focused on basic research, I really want to see its application out there impacting communities, solving real world problems…. These are really ways that I can see the basic technology I developed in my group go out there and make an impact.”
The grant was awarded by West Coast Consortium for Technology & Innovation in Pediatrics (CTIP), an accelerator that aims to advance development and execution in the pediatric medical devices field through providing assistance to promising companies.