Biological and Environmental Sciences Directorate

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2006 Awards and Achievements

ORNL research reported in Journal of Clinical Neurophysiology

The ORNL forewarning technology described in this paper has since been implemented on a PDA device (SeizAlert) and was selected as a winner of a 2005 R&D100 Award. SeizAlert is a prototype for a lowcost, compact, wearable device designed to alert the wearer and medical personnel of an impending epileptic seizure. In a real-life implementation, the alerting device would obtain EEG data from wireless sensors on the wearer's scalp and transmit that data to a device that interprets this information in real time.

ORNL is one of the world leaders in successful forewarning from noninvasive scalp EEG data. The new developments in this latest ORNL work include two-channel (bipolar) analysis rather than the previous single-channel analysis, which yields up to five hours of forewarning before the seizure event rather than the previous one-hour forewarning. The best results gave a total true rate higher than 90% and a low rate of false positives.

Hively, L. M., V. A. Protopopescu, and N. B. Munro, “Enhancements in Epilepsy Forewarning via Phase-Space Dissimilarity,” accepted, J. Clin. Neurophysiol., 2005.

Contact: Lee Hively (hivelylm@ornl.gov)

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"Perchlorate Environmental Occurrence, Interactions and Treatment" to be published

Perchlorate has become an issue nationwide in drinking water due to its widespread use and occurrences, high solubility and mobility, known health effects on thyroid hormone production, and treatment cost. There are more than 65 DoD and some DOE facilities with known perchlorate releases and detections. Although a national standard or minimum concentration limit (MCL) is still evolving, State standards or advisory levels have been set to range from 1 to 18 micrograms per liter (µg/L), and the estimated cleanup costs are estimated in billions of dollars. A timely book on “Perchlorate Environmental Occurrence, Interactions and Treatment” (edited by B. Gu and J. Coates) is soon to be published by Springer. This book provides the current state of science and technology with respect to the widespread occurrences of perchlorate contamination, its behavior, exposure pathways, toxicology and risk assessment, and recent advances in treatment technologies for removing perchlorate from contaminated media. The book is intended to serve as a comprehensive reference for environmental professionals, regulators, policy makers, scientists, engineers, and others interested in issues associated with perchlorate in the environment.

Contact: Baohua Gu (gub1@ornl.gov)

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Davison elected fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering

Dr. Brian Davison has been elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). He will be officially inducted as a Fellow at the Annual AIMBE Meeting on March 2 at the National Academy of Sciences. The election was based on his many distinguished contributions to the field as well as his demonstrated interest, concern, and involvement with critical issues affecting medical and biological engineering.

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Toxicity guidelines developed at ORNL published as book chapter by Academic Press

Watson, A., K. Bakshi, D. Opresko, R. Young, V. Hauschild, and J. King, "Cholinesterase Inhibitors as Chemical Warfare Agents: Community Preparedness Guidelines," Chapter 5, Toxicology of Organophosphate & Carbamate Compounds; Elsevier/Academic Press, Dec 2005 (North America), Jan 2006 (Europe).

An ORNL Life Sciences Division team comprised of Annetta Watson, Team Leader, Dennis Opresko and Bob Young of the Toxicology and Hazard Assessment Group have collaborated with their Army sponsors and National Research Council reviewers to author this book chapter documenting team development of chemical warfare agent exposure guidelines for community emergency preparedness (acute exposure guideline levels and reference doses). These guidelines are in current use by civilian regulatory and emergency response personnel, and will now be more readily available to user communities as published in the forthcoming book.

Contact: Annetta Watson (watsonap@ornl.gov)

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ORNL’s Animal Care and Use Program undergoes successful evaluation

ORNL’s Animal Care and Use Program was evaluated by the International Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care (AAALAC) in October 2005. This was the first evaluation since moving the mouse population into the new William L. and Liane B. Russell Laboratory for Functional and Comparative Genomics.

The ORNL Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, Bionetics, Inc. (responsible for staffing and management of the Russell Laboratory), and the Life Sciences Division’s Mammalian Genetics Group were complimented by the review team for an “unheard of” flawless evaluation.

The ORNL Animal Care and Use Program was judged of high quality for both program management and for the obvious team effort exhibited by these three groups.

Contacts: Barbara Beatty (beattybr@ornl.gov) and Dabney Johnson (johnsondk@ornl.gov)

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Vo-Dinh editor of new journal advancing nano-bio

Editor-in-chief Tuan Vo-Dinh envisions the new international peer-review journal NanoBiotechnology providing a forum that leads to explosive growth where nanotechnology and biomedical sciences converge.

Published by Humana Press, the first edition was issued this summer and features 10
papers covering topics including visualizing nature at work from the nano to macro scale, potential nanotechnology treatments for localized articular cartilage defects and an optical nanotool to study protein organization at the cell membrane.

Vo-Dinh leads a 46-member editorial board representing more than 40 international academic institution, including the University of Basel, Switzerland; Nagoya University, Japan; Columbia University, Harvard University, Princeton University, Stanford University, Ohio State University, and the University of Michigan; the University of Crete, Greece; Johns Hopkins School of Medicine; University of California at Berkeley, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara; University of Paris; University of Tokyo; Kyoto University, Japan; and University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.

Contact: Tuan Vo-Dinh (vodinht@ornl.gov)

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See More in the Awards Archive