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BU's Science and Technology Day on March 26 presented nearly 130 outstanding research posters by graduate students from both the Charles River and the Medical Campuses. Only 10 posters could be singled out for awards, but the judges remarked on the extraordinarily high quality of all the research, as well as the enormous diversity and range of disciplines represented. "Research Briefs" is highlighting this graduate research. For a list of awards, and access to abstracts of the work presented, visit
http:// www.bu.edu/research/ScienceDay/sciday2002.html.

A virtual fit. Patients who survive a heart attack are at risk for arrhythmias, occasional irregularities in the heartbeat that can cascade into ventricular fibrillation, in which the electrical impulses become extremely rapid or chaotic, or both, and can lead to sudden death. According to an article in the March 21, 2002, New England Journal of Medicine, such patients can cut their risk of death by nearly 31 percent with the use of implantable defibrillators. These small devices are surgically inserted into the patient's chest wall, where they can detect the onset of ventricular fibrillation and deliver an electric current to shock the heart back into its normal rhythm.

New research by Daniel Mocanu (ENG'02), winner of the College of Engineering Dean's Award at Science and Technology Day, may make the odds even better for cardiac patients. Mocanu, a Ph.D. candidate in the biomedical engineering lab of ENG Associate Professor Solomon Eisenberg, is developing a system, based on anatomically correct three-dimensional computer modeling, to custom-tailor the shock to the patient. This virtual fitting may improve a tedious and sometimes dangerous clinical calibration procedure, in which the patient's heart is repeatedly thrown into fibrillation and shocked out of it in order to determine the lowest, or threshold, energy level needed for a particular individual. Mocanu's models are based on X-ray CT scans of the patient. These noninvasive imaging techniques do not stress the heart. Mocanu predicts that the computational models may also be useful in evaluating how the electrodes that deliver the shock can best be configured to deliver effective defibrillation with the least possible shock to the system.

Getting at the truth. Epidemiological studies, and research in general, collect and use data from many sources -- medical records, self-reports, in-person interviews, and mailed questionnaires. Researchers suspect that how the data is collected may very well affect the outcome, particularly in studies of sensitive issues such as violence. Lise E. Fried (SPH'03), the recipient of the Science and Technology Day Dean's Award from the School of Public Health, studied this phenomenon, comparing how well self-reports and medical records compare in tracking incidents of violence against pregnant women.

In reviewing the literature on such violence, Fried found that the percentages reported ranged enormously, from 0.9 percent to 20.1 percent, depending on the methodology employed. Her study reviewed the records of 255 women who had participated in studies of infant death and very low infant birth weight between July 1992 and March 1996. She found a huge discrepancy -- records of interviews yielded far more reports of physical, sexual, and emotional violence than did reports in the official medical record. This, says Fried, highlights the importance of using all available sources of data, or the best available source, in conducting epidemiological studies.
Fried is also investigating the influence of sociodemographic and other factors on how well interview and medical records data agree, as well as how misclassification based on incomplete data changes estimates of how exposure to violence is associated with poor pregnancy outcomes. Fried will also be examining how exposure to violence, either as an adult or as a child, is related to subsequent pregnancy outcomes.

"Research Briefs" is written by Joan Schwartz in the Office of the Provost. To read more about BU research, visit http://www.bu.edu/research.

12 April 2002
Boston University
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