Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Ph.D. graduate Jesus Antonio Sanchez Perez won the Best Paper Award at the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Body Sensor Networks (BSN) Conference held in Chicago from Oct. 15-17.

Sanchez Perez, who recently started as an assistant professor at his undergraduate alma mater, the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez (UPRM), conducted the research in Professor Omer Inan’s Inan Research Lab. It’s the second consecutive year a researcher from Inan’s lab won the Best Paper Award from the conference.

The award-winning research introduced a novel approach for the continuous and non-invasive assessment of pleural effusion (PE) using transthoracic bioimpedance continuously measured at multiple frequencies.

PE, which affects over 1.5 million patients in the U.S., is the accumulation of excess fluid around the lungs, compressing them, increasing the risk of developing infections, and leading to respiratory distress.

Current PE assessments remain limited to sporadic measurements due to their cost, availability, or radiation exposure. This results in the unsatisfactory prognosis and assessment of symptoms for patients.

Sanchez Perez’s approach addresses the problem by exploiting the information embedded in the multi-frequency bioimpedance signals at multiple resolutions, namely the baseline and respiratory components.

He achieved this by extracting six fluid-tracking surrogates and found them to be strongly and significantly correlated to the infused pleural fluid in a porcine animal model of bilateral PE. The early results have promising, paving for continued research and testing.

Ultimately, the research may enable continuous and convenient respiratory monitoring in at-home and uncontrolled clinical settings, which can prevent acute deteriorations, improve treatment outcomes, and help patients.

The technology also has future applications in assessing many diseases including congestive heart failure, liver cirrhosis, and pneumonia.

Sanchez-Perez’s blended his research at ECE with his minor, biomedical engineering. It focused on investigating novel cardiopulmonary monitoring technologies, with a special focus on applications to clinical and acute-care settings.

It helped him to achieve his dream of returning to UPRM as a faculty member, where he’ll now continue doing innovative research with hopes of continuing to help people and achieve better medical outcomes.