Office of Technology Commercialization

Placethings

placethings is a mobile media platform and iPhone application that allows you to create and interact with place-based media from your mobile device.  placethings lets you create, place, and view photos, audio and text right where you are, for later retrieval and interaction by others. Possilble applications include reviews, messages, directions, games, location information, advertising and coupons, histories, memories, etc. placehthings was recently featured at the Mobilize conference.

The Principle Investigator for the placethings technology, as well as founder of the startup by the same name, is Dean Terry, Director of the Emerging Media and Mobile Lab programs at UTD and an Associate Professor.  (www.placethings.com)

StoneMag System

The “StoneMag System”, a technology under development jointly at UT Dallas and UT Southwestern Medical Center, is expected to enable the retrieval of kidney stones more efficiently, safely, rapidly, and, cost -effectively.  This system consists of 1) a proprietary chemical solution that magnetically coats calcium-based stones (80% of stones formed) in the kidney and 2) a novel, magnetically-tipped, stone retrieval instruments that attracts and retrieves magnetized stones. 

Approximately 13% of men and 7% of women in the U.S. will be diagnosed with a kidney stone at some time in their lives.  Large kidney stones (> 6 mm) are generally unable to spontaneously pass through the urinary tract, necessitating surgical fragmentation (e.g., by ultrasonic fragmentation--lithotripsy, for example) and either extraction of fragments or reliance on spontaneous passage of fragments by the patient.  However, retrieval of all individual stone fragments is almost impossible, and reliance on spontaneous passage is inconsistent.

 

Unfortunately, over half the people that develop kidney stones experience a recurrence of kidney stones due to the small fragments that remain in the kidney and act as “seeds”, which grow into new, larger stones . 

The StoneMag System is expected to enable, for the first time, a surgeon to effectively and rapidly retrieve ALL stone fragments from a kidney, significantly reducing operative time, treatment costs, and the morbidity of stone recurrences.  Furthermore, this technology will facilitate attraction of fragments from difficult-to-access locations in the collecting system.

The UTD Principle Investigator for the StoneMag system is Dr. Bruce Gnade, Vice President of Research, and professor. The project has recently won both a Texas Ignition Fund award and a "Opportunity Texas Proof-of-Concept" award from Emergent Technologies Inc.

Optical Motion Tracker for Prospective MRI Data Alignment (fMRI Head Tracking)

MRI magnetic field strengths are increasing to provide higher resolution images.  Prime among the impairments that degrade this high resolution is patient movement – both behavioral motion and the movement caused by expanding and contracting blood vessels due to heart action.  There are a number of software packages that provide post-scan image processing, but even the most advanced, non-rigid approaches can only reduce the blur to about 1.5-2 voxel sized error.  The fMRI Head Tracking technology tracks patient motion and prospectively adjusts the MRI fields to continuously align the image data with the anatomy in real time, resulting in greatly reduced processing time. There is currently no commercial product that performs prospective motion tracking for MRI.

The UTD Principle Investigator is Dr. Duncan MacFarlane, who is a full professor of electrical engineering and Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Programs.  The fMRI Head Tracking technology was recently awarded a Texas Ignition Fund grant by the UT System for further research, development, and commercialization.