Investigators: Tulio A. Valdez, M.D., M.Sc. Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, Stanford University
Dr. Valdez is an associate professor of pediatric Otolaryngology at the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, Stanford University. Dr. Valdez has an interest in airway surgery and swallowing disorders. He has a special interest in the management of sinus disease in cystic fibrosis. His research includes novel imaging modalities to better diagnose ear infections one of the most common pediatric problems. His research has now expanded to include better intraoperative imaging modalities in pediatric patients to improve surgical outcomes without the need for radiation exposure. He has been collaborating with the Laser Biomedical Research Center at MIT since 1999. As a service collaborator, he adapted LBRC technologies to implement a multi-wavelength otoscope using reflectance and fluorescence images and various computer vision algorithms to achieve identification and segmentation of middle ear and tympanic membrane structures.
The most common middle ear disease is otitis media, which refers to a continuum of inflammatory conditions of the middle ear, including acute infection. It is the second most common illness diagnosed in U.S. children, with over 8 million cases each year. Accoring to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), over 20 million antibiotic prescriptions per year in the U.S. are for otitis media cases. However, successful diagnosis of otitis media is estimated at only 51% for U.S. pediatricians, with over-diagnosis occurring 26% of the time [1]. The resulting excess antibiotic therapy has made otitis media a primary factor in increased antibiotic resistance. On the other hand, failure to diagnose otitis media can lead to long-term hearing impairment, a delay in language acquisition, or formation of destructive skin growths in the middle ear (cholesteatoma) which require surgical excision [2,3].
LBRC has provided instrumentation and technological knowledge for characterizing middle ear tissue and fluid to obtain a fundamental understanding of their spectroscopic properties. With LBRC advices, Dr. Valdez is developing a SWIR otoscope and develop clinical data analysis algorithm. LBRC also installed a multimodal spectroscopy (MMS) instrument in Dr. Valdez's laboratory. Since 2014 December, collected spectroscopy data has been analyzed using existing algorithms in LBRC guided by LBRC researchers.