that come here regularly, you'll know that we have a little bit of administrative stuff we do up front. First off, can you raise your hands if you are a for-credit student? Thank you. And if you're another type of student, not for credit. All right. And interested guests. All right. Wonderful. So I'm supposed to remind you to turn off your phones and to clean up your trash and to please not dine and dash because you will not want to miss our excellent presentation today. Before we get to today's talk, I want to give you a heads up for next week. It'll be something a little different. We're going to have IPAT Research Lightning Talks. So these will be a high-level overview of a whole bunch of different IPAT research projects. So that should be exciting and not to be missed. Now I want to introduce our speaker for today, Leanne West. So she is a Chief Engineer of Pediatric Technologies at the Georgia Tech Pediatric Innovation Network. And in her 25 years working at Georgia Tech, 25 plus, sorry, because you've even been here longer than me. Yeah. She has led multi-million dollar programs and teams of researchers to develop products for government and industry partners. She also started her own company, Intelligent Access, to take her invention of a wireless personal captioning system to market. She serves as the technical liaison between Georgia Tech and pediatric hospitals around the world, including Children's Health Care of Atlanta and Shriners Hospitals being the main partners. She works closely with clinicians to understand and identify problems that need a solution to allow them to take better care of their patients. She's an invited judge for many medical device pitch competitions and serves on several boards in the health care and technology arenas. So please welcome Leanne West. Thanks for having me here today. And is it going to make terrible noises? I think I need to turn this one off. You did turn it off. All right. Okay, now you can hear me and no feedback. Good. All right. So, like Mary Beth said, I'm Leanne West. My whole role here at Georgia Tech now is not as bringing in research for me. I do it for everybody else on campus. And there's lots of opportunities for both students and faculty to work on pediatric projects. And I will say they are always fun. So what I'm going to talk about today is the new Shriners Research Institute. And this is going to be with many institutions across Atlanta, but particularly Georgia Tech and Emory. So I wanted to give you a little bit of background on what I do in pediatrics in general. So with the Pediatric Innovation Network, this is really the network we're talking about when we talk about it. For all of these organizations, they're all players in the healthcare innovation ecosystem, particularly in pediatrics, and we work with all of them. And they include things like patient organizations, government organizations, professional societies, groups in Europe to do the same things, and also everybody in the Atlanta healthcare ecosystem like the Chamber, Georgia Life Sciences, Georgia Research Alliance, et cetera. So we try to work with everybody that we need to to help take a technology from I created a prototype in my lab now what do I do with it and so we use all of these resources to help make things come out and be working in the real world so Shriners Shriners has we've been working with them since 2018 yep 2018 we've had about 25 projects with them through the years it's totaled around five million and we've worked with 10 of their hospitals. So Shriners is an interesting group. Children's Health Care of Atlanta that we also work with is one center here in Atlanta, and then they have a group over at Grady and the Marcus Autism Center, but it's all local to Atlanta. Shriners, on the other hand, has 22 hospitals across North America, so 20 in the U.S., one in Canada, one in Mexico. And then they have 127 sites, clinical sites worldwide. So we've worked with 10 of their 20 here in the U.S. And we've had a lot of publications, a lot of presentations. The work has won a lot of awards, which is also really exciting. We've had products delivered that are in use at Shriners right now. And of those, we actually helped Shriners when they first came to us, these 22 hospitals were all running different electronic health records programs. And so we helped get them all on the same page, helped standardize their data, helped get it into the cloud so that all of the data from these 22 hospitals could be looked at collectively as opposed to individually. And that's going to be one of the things that makes this relationship really unique and really strong is that we have all of this data from all of their hospitals. Other things, so we do, we are having some projects led by Emory. It's important to Shriners to include that medical school group from Emory. And so we definitely do that as we do all over campus. And let's see. All right. So again, I'm not going to read all of these, but this is a list of the projects that we've had with them. So you can see some of the different types. Up top, you see the kid with the things stuck all over his body. Hold on, let's see if this is animated. Oh, there you go. And instead of all of those things hooked all over his body to do a sleep study, we have a guy here at Georgia Tech, Dr. Hong Yeo, and he built this flexible wearable sensor that looks kind of like a Band-Aid. And from that, it replaces all of these other wires that the kid has connected all over him. And if you can imagine trying to do a sleep study when you're completely covered in wires at a hospital sleep study facility, it's just not going to happen, right? I mean, it's terrible. So this is something that can now be done at home. And so Shriners is really interested in this to do sleep studies with their kids. You can see this one, another really interesting project, I think. This is using AI and x-rays and trying to see if you can't quantify the curve of the patient's spine of a child who has scoliosis. And right now, doctors look at it. They do some measurement on the x-rays. They calculate what these angles are, but everybody's a little bit different and there's nothing really standardized about it. So the thought is if we can do it with AI and quantify those curves specifically and consistently, then we're going to get better results in the long term. So they're really interested in that. You can see we've done lots in data informatics and AI with them. The other categories are clinical research, biologics, which is really more like regenerative medicine type things, genomics. We're going to be doing a lot more in genomics. I'm super excited about that. And I'll talk about that in a minute. And then motion analysis. So genomics and emotional analysis and AI are some of the main things they want to look at and do. They have all of this data from all of these patients and they take a genomic sample from every single one of their patients. And we think it's just going to be hopefully a goldmine of information that we can use our skill sets in AI to look at and figure out ways to help them take better care of their patients. But motion analytics, so Shriners, if you don't know them and aren't familiar with them, they really only look at kids with orthopedic conditions, craniofacial differences, cleft palate and lip, and burns, and those are the main things that they treat. So it's kind of a narrow swath of what happens in healthcare in general. These are some other pictures. I'll talk about these. So the glove here is kind of interesting. They have kids who are missing limbs or pieces of their limbs. And so if you have a prosthetic, you're not going to, even if it's robotically controlled, you're not going to know how hard you're gripping in that type of thing or if something's hot. And so there's a lab that's created this glove that sits over the prosthetic. Eventually you can imagine it could be built into it and the sensors there pick up things like heat or pressure but then transmit it to another part of the body so the the person with the prosthetic can kind of feel what's happening and they know what's happening. Let's see what else we've got up there this guy so there's another group on campus it does a lot of robotics and we have a group who's been working on a robotic exoskeleton. So for kids with cerebral palsy and Shriners treats more kids with cerebral palsy than any other hospital in the world, they have something called a crouched gait. And so it's really hard for them to walk. They can do it, but they usually do it with a walker. It can be very tiring for them. And so what our guys have built is an exoskeleton and it's come much farther along since these days. This kid is also wearing a harness, so that's not all part of the exoskeleton the exoskeleton is on the leg but now it's like this little dial that sits at the knee and one strap above and one strap below so now it's much much tinier and the idea with this one is can you give a little robotic assist to someone who's trying to walk to get their gait to be a little bit more normal so that it's easier for them to do and maybe wouldn't be as tiring for them especially if you're giving them a little bit of a robotic assistance, they don't have to put all of their efforts into taking those steps. And then the other cool thing that they did is they connected this to a video game. And so as the kid walks on the treadmill, there are birds flying and balloons that are set out in a good motion for a walking pattern. And so as they walk on the treadmill, their creature will pop all the balloons as it goes by so they know that they're taking the steps correctly. And so this is going to be used in some of the rehab that Shriners is interested in. So we've also had several Shriners meetings here, and we go to them every year. So they call them State of Science. And it's great because they bring in clinicians from all of their hospitals around North America. And we've been able to interact with them and do projects with them. This is how we've gotten integrated with them as being a part of it. And you can see some of the teams when they've come to visit Georgia Tech even. But also there are always student opportunities to present your research. And so definitely, definitely pay attention because we would love to have as many of you students participating in these projects as possible. All right, so how this kind of came about with the new research institute, and this is what's so exciting. So like I said, we've had a relationship with them since 2018. We've done all these projects, and they decided, in addition to our hospitals, we want to do research. We want to set up a research institute, and you know, they love Georgia Tech from our past relationship, but they hired a firm to go around and look and see where the best site to set up this research institute would be. So we were up against Duke and Vanderbilt. And so that was very nerve wracking for me. And why did we do this? The state was really involved. They took over the relationship during this search part of what was happening. and they realized that, you know, Shriners is this really large, well-known, well-respected entity and they wanted them here to do research with us to help expand what we're doing in the state of Georgia and what we're doing in Atlanta, at Emory, and at all of the other institutions around Atlanta. And so we were really excited. Shriners picked us because of the relationship that we had established with them, the fact that we already have a building in place that they're going to be able to outfit and move into, and the fact that we are number one in biomedical engineering research. And so, that's a really exciting opportunity for them, and it's an exciting opportunity for us. And again, it's going to be Atlanta-wide. So, Kennesaw State's going to be involved. Probably Georgia State, probably UGA. The Shepherd Center has some similar kids to them, so we're going to get them involved as well. So again, kind of think bigger than just us, which I think is also exciting because we do the best things when we have the most people involved. Oh, and this is another thing I'll clarify, is that they're not going to have patients here, So it's strictly going to be research, no patients. So it's not competition to a group like Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. It's meant to be complimentary. So I don't know, has anyone been to Science Square yet? Okay, a couple of you. Is it the coolest building ever? Yeah, it is. So if you haven't been over there, you should definitely find a reason to go at some point. It's really awesome. It's huge. It's the building you can see in the right here and it has 13 floors to it. When Shriners comes here, they're going to take up five of those floors. It's going to be 150,000 square feet that they're going to occupy and it's going to take about 12 to 18 months to build it out for them to be able to move in. But as floors get finished, they're going to start populating it. They are hiring a director right now. In fact, I'm meeting with some potential candidates next week, so super excited to see that moving along. They're going to have 50 endowed chairs. And as students, you may not necessarily know what an endowed chair is, but if you're faculty, you're like, wow, that's a lot and that's amazing. So they're going to be recruiting people from all over the country in their areas of interest to come here and be a part of this research institute and to work with us. They also have a genomics institute. Like I said, they are taking samples from all of their patients at every single one of their facilities, including the 127 clinics around the world. And they're going to be taking their genomic center that's currently in Tampa and moving it up here to be in Science Square as well. That's going to happen in late 2027, early 2028. And there are core facilities at Georgia Tech that we're going to share with them. So they're going to use some of ours, but they're going to build some new ones and we're going to be able to use some of theirs. So that's a nice synergy as well across campus. So like I said, they're going to focus on their patient population. So cerebral palsy, scoliosis, cleft palate, and burns. They really do more for kids with scoliosis and cerebral palsy than any other, again, hospitals almost combined. They have so many more patients. And the other thing that's cool about Shriners, if you don't know, is if you have one of their conditions and you go to their hospitals and get treated there, they don't charge you. So it's kind of like St. Jude's in that respect. So you can go and get the help that you need and you never have to pay anything if you can't afford it. So I love that about them too. But there are other musculoskeletal conditions that they have, but these are two of the largest populations. We're going to start with funding in artificial intelligence, and that can be applied to anything. So you think about the genomics, AI can be applied there. You think about the motion data that they have on their patients, whether it's a video or images, it can be applied there to learn things. The electronic health records, they have decades of records with these kids because some of them never even leave Shriners, but they can go there up to age 20, 21. And then if there's no adult doctor, they'll stay at Shriners. So lots and lots of data to be looked at and be analyzed. And I think this is going to tell us really great things about the health of these kids and how we can help them. The other thing that Shriners is super interested in is not just saying, I built this cool thing in the lab. They want it to be in use in their hospital. So that's another really important thing for them. Here are the topics that they're most interested in. You can see I stole these slides from Shriners. So biologics, I mean, again, think about if a child has a burn, how could you help them regrow skin, avoid scarring with all of the surgeries these kids have, bone may be brittle or it's broken or whatever. So there's a lot of things you can imagine that you could do with regenerative medicine, whether it's for bones or for skins or for something else. artificial intelligence again it kind of underlies everything that they want to do with us and data informatics again along those same lines but also this encompasses the relationship we have with them kind of getting their data structures in place so that we can look at that data and that it's consistent and clean and available as a group and not at each individual hospital. So motion analysis, again, they do a lot with assessing how a kid is walking, moving, crawling, moving their arms. And they have videos from so many different appointments. They have images. They want to be able to do motion analysis kind of out in the wild, if you will. So maybe be able to take it to one of their centers, say in Mexico, where they don't have the fancy setup of a room with, you know, 15 cameras on the ceiling looking from all angles at a kid who's got markers all over their body. They would really just love to be able to say, we've got one camera or two cameras and we're looking at you moving and you don't have markers on, but we want to be able to capture clinically how well you're moving and say the angle that your knee makes or your ankle makes. So that's going to be one of the main goals is this mark, uh, markless motion tracking, um, genomics laboratory. We already talked about that again. They take a sample from every single one of their patients everywhere. So it's really the most diverse set of genomic data, probably in the world again, and then clinical research. So how can we help in clinical research? Um, things like the, the sleep apnea, um, bandage that I showed you instead of all of those wires. That's going to make it better for their patients when they're trying to do these studies, and it's going to make it easier for the clinicians as well. The other thing that's kind of cool about what they're doing is sometimes you hear like top down, the president says, I want to do this, and that's what everybody has to do, or bottoms up, which is kind of more how a university works. If I have a cool idea, if I can get funding for it, then those are the research projects you're going to do. And so they're kind of taking an approach that's a little bit in the middle. Their goal is preeminence and the understanding and treatment of the kids that they serve. And then we're going to go, though, to all the different hospitals and talk to clinicians and say, if we wanted to be preeminent in cerebral palsy research, what are all the things that we would have to understand and know to be able to do that? And so we're kind of doing this meeting in the middle, if you will. And I think that that's going to be really great too, listening to both sides. We are going to engage with several of their hospitals and clinics. And the other thing about Science Square is there was another building in the picture I showed earlier off to the right, and that is an apartment complex. And so they're going to lease some of the apartments so that they can bring either children and families here to stay, or their clinicians can come in town for say a month or to and become really embedded and integrated with the Georgia Tech campus and the research that's going on. So for 2026, this is kind of when everything is going to kick off. They've leased the space in Science Square. They're visiting it with architects and getting all the designs done. But the research is really going to start in 2026. So in early 2026, we're going to have a call for proposals. It's going to be about AI and using that again and kind of any of the different things that we've talked about. And they're going to put a lot of money into that. So it'll be a great call. I'm super excited for it. January 8th through 10th, mark your calendar because students are welcome to come as well as faculty. So tell your friends. They're going to have a state of science event here at Shriners Square and be able to show off the new space. And what they will do, again, is bring clinicians from all of their different hospitals together. They're going to be talking about the research that they're doing. We're going to have Georgia Tech faculty talk about the research that we're doing that's complementary. And then we also typically have a poster session with prizes for students from the Atlanta area. So we would love to have Georgia Tech very well represented in that poster session. And so one of the things that they're going to do also is Shriners has already picked two different projects that they want to kind of keep up and keep going in January. And one is a shoe insert. So we have a guy on campus, actually Dr. Hong Yeo, that I mentioned earlier. earlier he's created this shoe insert and right now it's it's super flat so you would never know it was in your shoe and it has pressure sensors all over it so you can really tell the pressure when a person is walking so you can kind of see are their ankles kind of turned a little bit are they toe walking some of those things that are of importance to Shriners but what we're going to do is I sent it to Shriners I was like hey I think this is something you'd be interested in they're like definitely. And what we want to do is have our people talk to their clinicians to understand besides pressure, what else is there? What other kind of sensor could we put in there to better quantify how our kids are moving? And the idea is that right now they have them come in the clinic. They might just walk back and forth in front of a clinician. There are pressure plates on the floor so they could see how they're kind of moving a little bit. But this would replace sets. You could actually even send it home with a kid so that you know what's happening when they're not standing right in front of you and you're evaluating them. So we're going to get them together. They're going to look at different types of sensors like shear forces is apparently another force that they're really interested in getting. That is not something that's even commercially available. So we're going to work together and the goal is at the end of two years have something that is deployed at children, at Shriners to be in use by their clinicians. And so I'm really excited about that because again, that's the importance of going from the lab to actual clinical practice. The next one, I showed you the robotic exoskeleton. So that's going to be worked on a little bit more for refinement, like battery size, because right now they do have to carry a battery pack on their back. And it's pretty big and bulky. The team on campus used the replaceable batteries from yard tools. Y'all probably don't do a whole lot of yard work, but if you did, you would know what I'm talking about. So we're going to get the battery group here at Georgia Tech involved as well. And they really love the game. And so we're going to bring in a gaming group from iPad. Mary Beth, who introduced me, her team is going to be the one looking at the gaming element. And they're going to be putting that all together, making sure that we're capturing data that the clinicians want. We're giving it to them in a form that makes sense to them and tells them what they need to know. But we're also going to make it as fun as possible for the kids. So it's not just, hey, we're going to strap you in a harness and now walk for 10 minutes for us. Right. And we're going to take video of you while you do it. So this is going to be able to kind of combine those things, but make it a little bit more fun for them. And they can really see in real time how their gait is doing. And so again, it's kind of that in two years, we want to see this in use in the clinic in Shriner's. They have 14 motion labs in those 22 hospitals that I mentioned. And so there's going to be, you know, it's going to be used widely. So really excited about that. And that's it. So I realize I'm a little bit short, but I thought y'all might have questions about some of the things we're doing or want to do with Shriners or questions in general. So feel free to ask and don't be shy. Yeah. So they haven't really. And that's another one of the things that we're doing with them right now. So Dr. May Wong, if anyone knows her she's been doing some AR VR interventions and one is really cool so her group is also the group doing the the calculating the spinal curvature so they built this VR headset and you look this way and it gives some information about the kid you look this way and it gives the x-rays and curves and things marked out you look straight ahead and they have a 3d model built from an MRI of the kid that was originally done so that they They can do surgical planning. You can actually grab the spine and move it around and look at it in 3D. So it's really cool. But once people at Schreiner saw it, they were like, oh, my gosh. The other thing that this can be used for is with training patients in spinal surgery. Because apparently right now you have to do 10 assisted spinal surgeries to be considered to be able to do it yourself. And so that's a lot of operating time. And also, you know, just the coordination of having to be there for those 10 surgeries, right? So if you can do it virtually, then that's going to be a lot better for training and they can get through training faster. And then the third thing was, is they're like, oh, my gosh, I bet the kids would love to see this and learn about what's going to happen to them in spinal surgery and be able to see, you know, what the doctor is seeing, what the doctor is talking about. so just that one project in VR really kind of took off and I think that's gonna be really exciting too and then we have another one where a kid will sit on a bench and the doctor will you have somebody standing behind them and taking video and you have somebody sitting next to them telling them what to do and this is about arm motion and so they have them you know rotate their arm and reach out here and reach over here and someone watching it has to be like yeah they got that direction pretty well. So May's group also built a virtual reality game that has balls floating all around you in a circular pattern. And so now the kids can grab at the balls and they're doing everything that this person wants them to do, all the movements. But again, it's also way more fun than sitting there and having someone be like, okay, now raise your left arm and go to the left. So yes, virtual reality, augmented reality is definitely going to be a part of it. Another thing that they did is they took a CT scan and if you have on that eye set you can lower your hand and it goes down like cross sections of the spine and then you can bring it back up and you could stop at certain places to really see what's in that CT layer by layer. So it's really cool. Any other questions? I just have a couple of other professors who might want to talk with you because the research is really adjacent. It might fit in kind of perfectly. Can yeah absolutely and so yes if you know teachers or other students who are interested in these topics please please please have them come to me you can reach out through iPad you can reach out to me directly and we definitely want as many people involved as possible any other questions yes ah yes good questions. So every week my group, the Pediatric Innovation Network, puts out an email and it has all the opportunities with all the children's hospitals. So if you want to sign up for our email newsletter, that is where the calls and the activities with Shriners are all going to be announced. Also the ones we have with children's and other hospitals, an opportunity. So please feel free to reach out and we can add you to that email distribution list. Anything else? So you mentioned sort of the state involvement in getting like this relationship with Shriners and Georgia Tech. How fundamental was that involvement from the state to actually get Shriners to come to Georgia Tech? It was really important. So when Shriners decided to do like a formal process to figure out where they wanted to put this, it was taken out of Georgia Tech's hands and it was all given to the state. And that's the only group that the search firm would talk to is the state, and then the state could bring in people as Shriners requested. So, they were very fundamental. They did things that helped, like different tax breaks, you know, assistance, like whatever. They gave them a whole list of things that we would do for them if they chose the state of Georgia and Science Square as where they were going to be. So I was, again, super happy that they picked us over Vanderbilt and Duke because they're also great universities. Yeah. You mentioned genomics. Can you talk a bit more about the research and the projects that are currently happening with them? Yeah. So with several of their conditions, these are a lot of things that kids are born with and they are due to genetic anomalies. And so, for example, in scoliosis right now, we're doing a study with them, and we're trying to identify what genes are associated with what different types of scoliosis. And we found all the ones in the literature so far, which is good. And we found a couple that either haven't been in the literature or maybe a mention in the literature. So I love that our AI on the genomic data is matching what other people have found, but going beyond it too. And then the goal is really to say, okay, you have severe scoliosis, you have these genetic mutations, so you fall into this type of category, phenotype one, another kid's phenotype two, phenotype three. So we want to be able to define those phenotypes and then say, for this type of kid, this type of surgery, this type of treatment, this type of rehabilitation works best for you, but it's going to look different for the kid over here. So they're doing that with scoliosis, and I think we're getting ready to start one with cerebral palsy. It's the same kind of thing. There are definitely different phenotypes of these kids, and they have some phenotypes defined if you look it up, but the idea is to say, you know, are there subcategories or is there another phenotype that we need to really be considering? and then looking at all that EHR data and knowing the outcomes of the treatments and surgeries they've had, what is working best for these kids. So it's all about taking better care of their kids. But it's, I mean, it's a really cool opportunity. It's one of those things that, you know, since AI first started being talked about in healthcare, it's what has been said, you want to do this type of thing. You want to phenotype and you want to know what works, but nobody's really had all of the data to do this. And now we're going to with Shriners. So I think it's super exciting and I think it's really going to help them in their goal of being preeminent in research and treatment for kids with cerebral palsy, scoliosis and other conditions but I think it's also really going to help put Georgia Tech on the map for being able to do all of these things that a lot of people have talked about for a long time. I think one thing, one of the biggest concerns AI in healthcare is HIPAA violations so how do you guys navigate that challenge? Yep. So Shriners gives us de-identified data. And then if you think about genomics, though, that's kind of inherently identified specifically to you, right? And so that's one of those things that is really being talked about in the healthcare industry because you can't de-identify it, but you want to do the research because you want to help these kids. So a lot of times the patients will be asked and told that, you know, we're going to take this sample from you. We're going to use it in research so we can take better care of kids like you. And most patients do it. So I'm a rare disease patient myself. And I'm like, please take everything in mind, because if you can help somebody else not have what I have or better treat what I have, I'm all for it. Right. And you'll find that a lot in pediatric research, more so than even in adult medicine. People just want to do the right thing for kids. so we definitely follow all HIPAA rules and regulations for the other electronic health record data. Genomics is kind of a gray area but a lot of people agree to it because it's going to make a huge difference for other kids. Yeah anyone else? All right last call. Okay we're good thank you.