[:en]The project led by Dr. Matías Zañartu, Electronics Department academic, which focuses on vocal cord pathologies and includes the distinguished work of 4 students from campus, the plan being to apply next year, for the first time, to an important international fund.

Since 4 years ago, a research team from USM has been working side by side with MIT and the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) from Harvard, to improve the way vocal cord problems are detected and treated.

In the last few months, this close collaboration has shown an increasing prominence from the national campus. The initiative led by Dr. Matías Zañartu, Electronics Department academic and voice lab director from campus, recently contemplated a seminar organized by MIT in Cambridge, to which the academic travelled to, accompanied by 4 students: Victor Espinoza, Gabriel Galindo and Juan Pablo Cortés, all of them from the Electronics Engineering Doctorate; and Manuel Díaz, Electronics Engineering M.Sc from campus.

“Our student’s efforts produced outstanding results, like co-tutelle for their thesis, labor in conjoint publication and concrete internship opportunities in MIT, like the case of doctorate student Victor Espinoza, who will be staying there from 3 months this year”, Dr. Zañartu emphasizes.

The student’s importance

The project focuses on the installation of non-invasive sensors for ambulatory monitoring, on the everyday use and requirement of the vocal cords. This way, a model for each individual and an enormous amount of data is generated, that allows you to use modern analysis tools to make irreversible tissue damaged pre-emption more feasible and generate a more effective treatment.

“The voice field is being approached in different engineering perspectives: in USM, through signal and image processing, mathematic models, machine learning, etc.”, the researcher explains “And in MIT-MGH, there’s an expert team on the medical field and in data analysis labors with new machine learning tools, like symbolic mismatch”.

Currently, USM has dedicated collaboration track with MIT, in other words, a special conjoint collaboration fund managed by MIT, to which every academic and researcher can apply. Professor Zañartu has received these funds to finance exchange activities with MIT and this year the efforts will focus on applying to one of USA’s most important and competitive funds, which might mean a breakthrough for this initiative. This is a turning point on an institutional level as well, since the establishment has never applied these funds for USA’s research.

“The project is pushing forward firmly, but besides that, a very interesting dynamic was created, where our institution is considerably more validated that before”, Matias Zañartu explains. “In fact, USM has more publications, projects and participating students than MIT itself in this project”.

The academic underlines that “the fact that this initiative has had this evolution, has a lot to do with the role that they have taken: it’s marvelous to have several master and doctorate students working highly motivated on the same subject, and the idea is to maintain this bond and give the opportunity to other USM students to take part in this partnership with an important institution as MIT. Being able to do a 3 month internship in place like that strongly boosts our student’s professional careers.”

This year’s international fund application contemplates a visit from an MIT-MGH committee in March to Chile, with the sole purpose of preparing the application tasks for USA’s competitive funds. It should be noted that, this initiative has had the support from USM’s Advanced Center for Electronic and Electric Engineering.

Fuente: USM Noticias

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