ESL/ECE Students Win Big in the National Neuro Startup Challenge
After winning the 2nd place at the Business Plan Competition held by the FisherCollege of Business at the OSU in April 2015, the team NeuroCognetix (then called Buckeye SmarterImage), recieves one of the highly coveted 13 spots in the Neuro Startup Challenge, held at the national level by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Center for Advancing Innovation (CAI) and the Heritage Provider Network.
The announcement was released by CAI on May 21, 2015 and the team
NeuroCognetix, which includes students from ECE (Safa Salman, ESL; Markus Novak, ESL; A.T.M. Sarwar), BME (Michael Bush) and MBA (John Lockwood), is announced as one of the 13 winners for their project titled "A motion correction method to reduce MRI artifacts during brain inspection". In the business plan stage of the competition, the team pitched their idea to a panel of judges via live video conference on April 20th. As the winners of this challenge, the team NeuroCognetix receives a $2,500 monetary award and qualifies to move on the the final phase of the challenge, Phase 3: The Start-up. In this final phase, the teams launch their start-ups, including incorporation, apply for licenses, and execute other regulatory/developmental needs.
The ECE students, Safa Salman, also the team leader, and Markus Novak, both conduct their research at ESL and advised by Prof. John L. Volakis. Safa's research areas include broadband arrays, biomedical applications of antennas, implanted antennas, ablation techniques and wearable continuous time health monitoring sensors. She is scheduled to give a talk on the "Rudimentary Deep Tissue Imaging Through a Wearable Real-Time Monitoring System" at the upcoming 2015 APS/URSI Meeting on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 in Vancouver, Canada. Markus' research interests include ultrawideband antennas and transceivers, as well as millimeter-wave antennas. He is scheduled to give a poster presentation at the same meeting on Monday, July 20 on the topic of "Wideband Array for C, X, and Ku-Band Applications with 5.3:1 Bandwidth".
Background of the Challenge:
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has a significant portfolio of inventions available for licensing. The Center for Advancing Innovation (CAI) has evaluated many of them to identify those with the strongest commercial viability. The Heritage Provider Network, the NIH, and CAI have launched a start-up Challenge to exploit these opportunities in August 2014. More than 578 students and entrepreneurs in 70 teams competed in the challenge. Teams competed in two phases during which they were mentored by experts to produce business plans, financial models and live pitches. In the final phase, the winning teams will be mentored to launch their startups.
The Pitch: NeuroCognetix
Patient movement is the single largest contributor to image acquisition time, rescan rate, and image quality degradation in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain and head. Annually, MRI rescans due to motion cost the U.S. healthcare system $6.3B. The patent-pending Motion Correction System (MCS) from Buckeye SmarterImage (BSI) helps solve this problem. Using a camera and proprietary software algorithm, the MCS tracks and compensates for patient motion in real time, thus rendering what would have been an unusable scan, usable. With a potential market of over 10,000 existing machines in the US alone, market entry is strengthened through partnerships with early development collaborators and industry partners, including the Wexner Medical Center, Nationwide Children’s Hospital, the National Institute of Health, GE healthcare and Siemens healthcare — allowing BSI to leverage their brand in the MRI community.
