To watch and listen to the story, please follow the link to CTV News. 

UM is building a new AirSAFE Lab, which will be Canada’s first multi-disciplinary research centre for biomedical, engineering, natural science and occupational health experts to study how inhaled pollutants impact health and disease. Chartrand says she looks forward to the research that will be undertaken at this new facility.

To read the full story, please visit CityNews Winnipeg.

Nolan De Leon, 2024 Falling Walls Manitoba winner.

Falling Walls Lab is an international competition, created by the Falling Walls Foundation, inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.  It promotes research and innovation in all disciplines, by posing the question, “Which walls will fall next?” 

Nolan De Leon (Dr.MD, PhD) won the grand prize sponsored by InfoMagnetics Technologies. The prize includes $1000 cash along with airfare and accommodations in Berlin, Germany to compete in the global Falling Walls competition finale Nov. 7 to 9 with their presentation, Breaking the Wall of Prenatal Diagnostics.

Megan Crooks (MA Clinical Psychology) won the second-place prize of $750 sponsored by Research Manitoba, with the presentation entitled, Breaking the Wall of Phantom Pain Prevention.

Anastasia Matsko (Dr.Med/PhD) was the third-place finalist winning $500 sponsored by QDoc Virtual Healthcare with the presentation Breaking the Wall of Dental Implants.

Sajad Saraygord Afshari (PhD, P.Eng, Postdoc), won the Audience Choice award of $500 sponsored by Red River College Polytechnic for the presentation, Breaking the Wall of AI-Powered Drone Work: Revolutionizing Wildfire Prevention.

“The Falling Walls Lab is an important opportunity to showcase the world-class research happening every day in Manitoba and I would like to thank the large community who came together to bring this celebration to life,” said Dr. Hans-Joachim Wieden, Associate Vice-President Partnerships Knowledge Mobilization & Innovation. “Students are the greatest drivers of change in addressing the pressing challenges faced by society and by empowering entrepreneurs and innovators across disciplines we can make these great ideas a reality.”

Congratulations to all the presenters for sharing their exciting research and being a part of this second Falling Walls Manitoba event:

• Mahdi Zakeri (Healthcare & Medical Sciences): Breaking the Wall of Bone Loss & Healing
• Abhinav Tiwari (Agriculture & Food Science): Breaking the Wall of Grain Drying
• Juanita Garcia (Healthcare & Medical Sciences): Breaking the Wall of Exercise in Spinal Injury
• Venkata Daggupati (Computing & Information Science): Breaking the Wall of Emergency Room Challenges
• Anastasia Matsko (Engineering & Technology): Breaking the Wall of Dental Implants
• Hussein Agoushi (Architecture & Urban Studies): Breaking the Wall of Community Silence
• Samantha Phrakonkham (Healthcare & Technology): Breaking the Wall of Eye Healthcare
• Sajad Saraygord Afshari (Engineering & Technology): Breaking the Wall of AI-Powered Drone Work: Revolutionizing Wildfire Prevention
• Amir Barzegar Behrooz (Healthcare & Medical Sciences): Breaking the Wall of Alzheimer’s Therapy
• Megan Crooks (Healthcare & Medical Sciences): Breaking the Wall of Phantom Pain Prevention
• Nolan De Leon (Healthcare & Medical Sciences): Breaking the Wall of Prenatal Diagnostics
• Carmine Slipski (Healthcare & Medical Sciences): Breaking the Wall of Oral Health Detection

“The key for brain exercises is to keep the brain active,” said Moussavi. “You have to challenge your brain with the things that you don’t know. During a bridge game, the synapses in the brain are activated and being strengthened, so they remain active.”

To read the full story, please visit Brandon Sun. 

This accomplishment builds upon an already outstanding history of impactful and innovative research for Dr. Moussavi. “I congratulate Dr. Moussavi on her prestigious appointment as a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair,” said Dr. Mario Pinto, vice-president (research and international). “Her research in the early detection and treatment of dementia is groundbreaking and brings hope to many. The leadership shown by Dr. Moussavi, and the other UM CRCs, greatly benefits the learning experience of all the students they work with.”

Dr. Moussavi’s breadth of contributions in her field is a legacy to honour and reflect upon. From her pioneering work in respiratory sounds signal processing, to the introduction of Canada’s first Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) Alzheimer’s treatment program, she is solidified as an international leader in the area of Biomedical Engineering (BME).

As founder and former director of UM’s BME graduate program, Dr. Moussavi has been attracting top students for two decades. Her passion and impact as a researcher and teacher has allowed her to excel as a mentor to numerous high school students, undergraduate students and graduate trainees. In 2016, her clinical trials for new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease received funding from the Weston Brain Institute for a large multi-center international study. This support broadened Dr. Moussavi’s leadership skills as she led a team of collaborators on various local, national and international levels.

Dr. Moussavi’s current research program focuses on the goal of better diagnosing the onset of neurodegenerative dementia. It also centres on offering personalized optimized treatments for affected individuals, while monitoring their cognitive changes longitudinally. In future plans, Dr. Moussavi looks to make diagnosis, treatment and monitoring programs more accessible to all sectors of society, mobilizing the gained knowledge.

View the full list of Canada Research Chair recipients for more information.

At 3MT, challengers have just three minutes to present their research in plain language using only a single slide to illustrate their ideas. Competitors are judged on comprehension, engagement and ease of communication while providing an understanding of the background and significance of their research.

In three exciting heats, up to 35 challengers from 16 different departments will be going head-to-head (virtually) as they consolidate their ideas and research discoveries so they can be presented concisely to a non-specialist audience. The winners of each heat will go on to the final, on April 7, for a chance to place in the top three for cash prizes.

Check out the list of challengers who will be competing in heats this year.

Attendance for this event is open to all and students are especially encouraged to take advantage of this opportunity to watch and gain perspectives and ideas for their own research, thesis or future academic interests. This is also an excellent opportunity for anyone to learn about the innovative research happening at UM, Manitoba’s only research-intensive university.

Acting Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies, Kelley Main, encourages everyone to watch the heats. “The 3MT heats are a showcase of the amazing research being done at the University of Manitoba and they highlight the ability of our graduate students to share their passion for research with a wide audience.”

In the past, challengers have presented on a variety of topics, including: cannabis as a potential therapy for breast cancer, passive acoustic monitoring of marine mammals in the Canadian Arctic, silent MRI machines to reduce patient stress, and designing buildings to withstand earthquakes.

All competitions will be held online and you can share in the competition by watching the heats on your laptop, desktop, phone or other device.

Heat #1: Wednesday, March 2, 2022, at 10:30 a.m.
Heat #2: Thursday, March 3, 2022, at 1:00 p.m.
Heat #3: Friday, March 4, 2022, at 1:00 p.m.

Links to watch each heat will be posted here.

Come support our graduate students!

Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) is a research communication competition developed by The University of Queensland. For more information on the UM 3MT competition visit the U of M 3MT® website.

One reason why there are so many undiagnosed and untreated OSA cases is that accurate diagnosis usually requires an expensive, labour-intensive overnight sleep study called polysomnography (PSG). But new technology developed at the University of Manitoba can tell patients if they have OSA in 30 seconds, just by analysis of their breathing sounds while they are wide awake.

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA)

OSA is the temporary cessation of breathing while asleep. An apnea event is a pause in breathing that lasts more than 10 seconds and results in a drop of more than three per cent in the level of oxygen in the blood. Similarly, a reduction in respiratory flow of more than 50 per cent that lasts more than 10 seconds, combined with a drop in blood oxygen level of greater than three per cent, is called a hypopnea event.

The number of apnea and hypopnea events per hour of sleep is called apnea/hypopnea index (AHI), a measure of OSA severity.

A very high AHI, for example 200, means that during one hour of sleep, breathing stops (or is reduced more than 50 per cent) 200 times, each time for more than 10 seconds. Most of these events are accompanied by blood oxygen level decreases that may lead to hypoxia, which may trigger the brain to wake up to restore the oxygen level.

A person with a high AHI has a very broken sleep. Indeed, they may never reach a deep sleep. For that reason, they always feel tired and sleepy during the day.

While a full overnight PSG records more than 15 different biological signals, there are many portable PSG devices that can be used by people in their own homes that record three to five signals and give a relatively accurate diagnosis.

However, for sleep apnea cases that need treatment, a full PSG assessment in a sleep lab is needed, during which sleep technicians try different manoeuvres to determine best treatment. For example, for determining the optimal air pressure for a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine to keep the patient’s airway open during different stages of sleep.

The widespread underdiagnosis of sleep apnea becomes crucial for those who need general anesthesia before a surgery, because apneic patients need special care after surgery. Being able to detect OSA within a few minutes when a patient is awake would help ensure these patients receive the care they need. That is what AWakeOSA technology promises.

Wide-awake identification of obstructive sleep apnea

AWakeOSA is a smart technology with an app that provides instructions for recording breathing sounds with a small microphone. It records tracheal breathing sounds through five breaths taken while breathing through the nose and another five cycles while breathing through the mouth. The recording is done while the person is awake and lying on their back.

This technology has been under development since 2010. Our rationale for using awake tracheal breathing sounds for detection of OSA is based on the upper airway structure, which is different in people with sleep apnea compared to that of people without apnea, even while awake. Tracheal breathing sounds are affected by a change in the upper airway structure.

These changes in breathing sounds cannot be detected by human ears, but by using advanced signal processing and machine learning techniques we have been able to show that indeed the breathing sounds are reflecting the upper airway pathology. However, showing a high correlation between the OSA and the features of breathing sounds does not guarantee a highly accurate detection of OSA.

Detecting OSA by only breathing sounds analysis is challenging because of the heterogeneity of sleep apnea, which can have different causes resulting in different characteristics of breath sounds. Also, there are many variables including age, gender, height, weight and smoking history that affect breathing sounds’ characteristics.

To overcome these challenges, we came up with a smart diagnostic scheme that considers the impact of all these confounding variables. With the help of a sophisticated machine learning algorithm (AWakeOSA), our team can now reliably and accurately detect the severity of OSA during wakefulness. Validation of the technology in a much larger population is planned.

Surgical patients

One important application is for surgical patients with unknown OSA status who are going under general anesthesia. For that application, sensitivity of the test (detecting those who do have sleep apnea) is more important than the specificity (detecting those who do not have sleep apnea).

The beauty of the smart decision-making of the AWakeOSA algorithm is that we can increase its sensitivity at a minor cost to its specificity. That means accurately identifying all patients with sleep apnea is the key priority — as it would be with surgical patients — we can increase OSA detection accuracy with only a minor increase in false positive findings.

Depending on its application, there is some flexibility to adjust the sensitivity/specificity of the test, depending on which one is more important.

The AWakeOSA technology can also determine those in need of treatment for sleep apnea with greater than 89 per cent accuracy. That means it can be used as an accurate screening tool to reduce the number of people needing full PSG assessment, saving millions of dollars in costs to the health-care system.

This story from Zahra Moussavi (Professor of Biomedical Engineering, UM) originally was published by The Conversation. It appears here under a Creative Commons licence.

Instead of taking months or years to get a correct diagnosis, University of Manitoba researchers say they’ve found a way to tell if someone has bipolar disorder or major depression with a painless test that takes less than an hour.

“It’s very hard to tell if a person has bipolar disorder or depression,” said Brian Lithgow, an adjunct biomedical engineering professor who runs a neurodiagnostics lab.

It can take years of observation to get the diagnosis right. Someone with bipolar disorder can have 10 major depressive episodes for every manic event, and go years without having a manic event, he said.

If they’re diagnosed with major depression and are actually bipolar, medication could trigger a manic event and “really cause some damage,” said Lithgow, who leads the diagnostic and neurosignal processing research groups at Winnipeg’s Riverview Health Centre and at Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia.

Lithgow’s team uses electrovestibulography, which involves the subject sitting in a moving hydraulic chair while high-tech earbuds measure impulses from their vestibular system, which includes the parts of the inner ear and brain that help control balance.

He started off researching cochlear implants for people with nerve deafness and then shifted his focus to the vestibular system, looking at the responses of people with Parkinson’s disease before and after taking medication. By accident, his team discovered that the response of someone with Parkinson’s who also had major depression was very different. That led to further research involving patients with major depression, whose responses looked very different than those with bipolar disorder.

“People with (disorders) have different responses to healthy people,” Lithgow said. The years of research led to an article posted in the latest World Journal of Biological Psychiatry.

“What we’d like to do is commercialize this thing, if possible,” Lithgow said, adding that will require more research to back up the findings. “If we can find a local psychiatrist willing to collaborate, we would like to look for 300 volunteers who’ve been diagnosed with major depression or bipolar to take part in another double-blind study,” he said.

Graduate student Mohammad Reza Kazemian has found a way to banish bacteria from cooking surfaces. You’d be hard pressed to find research that positively impacts the general populace to such a degree. Food poisoning (i.e. ingesting harmful microbes) causes $77 billion in economic loses every year in the U.S. alone. Cancer—“The Emperor of All Maladies”—results in $80 billion.

“Foodborne illnesses and food contamination has become a big issue all around the world,” Kazemian says. “So I decided to do something about it.”

Preventing harmful bacteria from infesting our food is critical to our health and prosperity, especially in the face of growing legions of antibiotic-resistance strands of bacteria. Thankfully, Kazemian, a master’s student in biomedical engineering and 3MT finalist, has produced some good news working with his advisor Song Liu in the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences.

They have created a surface microbes cannot colonize. Current efforts in food plants, industrial and commercial kitchens involve using bleach to sanitize stainless steel counters and equipment. That works. But once cleaned, how do you guarantee bacteria do not find their way back to the surface through dust particles, an errant cloth, or a bit of spittle?

Kazemian has engineered an ingenious solution.

All bacteria hold a negative charge, so he created a stainless steel surface that has coating with positive charge and chlorine atoms. Since opposites attract, the chlorine attaches to any bacterium and kills it. It gives sanitation efforts staying power, and Kazemian’s surface can be recharged with a wash of diluted bleach.

Growing up in Iran, he didn’t imagine pursuing a life devoted to curbing microbes, but he was passionate about something that is as bountiful: the stars.

“I loved to look at the sky and stars and had this question in my mind of how things in the sky work. But things always change in life, and now I am looking at bacteria. Well, at least the principle is the same—I am always questioning!”

For two billion years, bacteria were the only forms of life. Earth, author Bill Bryson notes, is their planet, “and we are on it only because they allow us to be.” But Kazemian has found a way to keep a surface of it just for us.

Bon appétit.

Meet the other new faces of innovation and discovery. 

This is why the Government of Canada is investing research infrastructure funds through the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) for the new Biomaterials and Nanomedicine Laboratory at the University of Manitoba.

Malcolm Xing shows synthetic muscle being controlled by electrodes.

The funding was announced at the U of M today by the Honourable Kirsty Duncan, Minister of Science, as part of a CFI investment of more than $554 million in 117 new infrastructure projects at 61 universities, colleges and research hospitals across Canada. With this announcement, the CFI also marks an important milestone, having funded more than 10,000 projects since it began in 1997.

Using state-of-the-art equipment, Malcolm Xing, an emerging leader in biomedical engineering and nanomedicine at the University of Manitoba, will develop drug-loaded nanoparticles that target tumour cells. He and his team will also engineer 3-D printed nanocomposites for skin grafts used in treating foot ulcers in diabetics. This project is one of four at the university to receive CFI funding, for a total of $1.2 million.

“I thank the Government of Canada and the Canada Foundation for Innovation for this funding to support my research program. Our lab aims to develop new STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Materials/Medicine/Mathematics) for stem cells and organs. This will lead to a better life for all,” Xing said.

U of M recipients of CFI funding were on hand in the atrium of the Brodie Centre on the Bannatyne campus to demonstrate some of their research to Minister Duncan.

Xing demonstrated implantable biosensors for the heart and brain, how an ultrathin graphene biosensor can detect diabetes and how oil and water can be separated using graphene oxide, among other technologies he is developing.

Faculty of Science professors and their grad students from demonstrated their research. The Autonomous Agents lab led by Dr. John Anderson demonstrated their arrow-shooting robots. The Human Computer Interaction (HCI) lab, led by Dr. Jim Young and Dr. Andrea Bunt, demonstrated Pepper, a humanoid companion. Dr. Bunt showcased her recent research in the areas of human-computer interaction and intelligent interactive systems. Professor Jane Waterman, Biological Sciences discussed her research on Polar Bears, and brought along several students from Kelvin High School to discuss their work with the International Student-Led Arctic Monitoring and Research ISAMR project. Several graduate students from the Belmonte Lab, also demonstrated their research into cellular and molecular functions of plant development and plant pathogenesis. Astronomers Stefi Baum, Samar Safi-Harb also showcased their work on Unlocking the Radio Sky with Next-Generation Survey Astronomy and other Sky Pathfinder and Survey Astronomy.

The heavens get a new library

There’s a lot to catalogue out there // Image: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 Team

Dean of Science Stefi Baum, and Canada Research Chair Samar Safi-Harb, and colleagues are partnering with colleagues at the University of Toronto and six other Canadian institutions as well as international partners to develop a virtual radio astronomy data centre. The project received $10 million in new CFI funding to create the innovative astronomical data systems that will usher in a new era of discovery.

Modern radio telescopes collect terabytes of data everyday, an overwhelming amount. U of M physics and astronomy researchers in collaboration with computer science researchers working on this new project will turn the raw data into images and catalogues that astronomers can use to investigate cosmic magnetism, the evolution of galaxies, exotic stars, and more.

“This work will directly benefit Manitoba in several ways,” Baum says. “First, the infrastructure that we develop will have a diverse range of potential applications through new visualization, data mining, and deep learning techniques to medicine, finance, remote sensing, agriculture and a host of other applications which involve large databases of information. Second, we will produce trainees who will be highly proficient in signal processing, data-intensive research and high-performance computing, all key for the growth of innovation and industry in Manitoba.”

Detecting rumbles

U of M’s Andrew Frederiksen, a professor of earthquake seismology in the department of geological sciences, is partnering with a team at Dalhousie University to create a National Facility for Seismic Imaging (NFSI). Currently, most seismic measurements are taken on land, even though 71 per cent of Earth is ocean. The consequent gap in our understanding of the seafloor is particularly acute in Canada, which has the longest coastline in the world. Thus, NFSI will design, build, and operate 120 next-generation ocean-bottom seismometers (OBS) to serve the needs of Canadian researchers.

The first set of planned experiments will explore seismic hazard on Canada’s west coast, earthquakes and ice movement in the High Arctic, offshore rifting in Nova Scotia and Labrador, and seismicity induced by industrial activity in the Canadian Prairies and central Canada. Regarding the latter, one crucial insights these new sensors will provide is how to mitigate seismic hazards from oil and gas activity in places like southwest Manitoba.

Answering once impossible questions

You’ve got questions. Now we’ll get answers. // Illustration Kaitlin O’Toole, U of M

What are the economic outcomes of immigrants and refugees by entry program? How do corporate tax rates affect international trade? How do health outcomes vary in relation to provincial policy approaches?

While such questions are of pressing policy priority, they have always been virtually impossible to answer because we lacked the data to answer them.

Evelyn Forget, professor of community health sciences, will work with Research Data Centres across Canada to create The CRDCN Transition to High Performance Computing: Liberating Data for Research and Policy to answer these questions by using high performance computers to crunch vast amounts of data from government administrative databases, surveys and censuses. This will put Canada at the forefront of health and social science research and help policy be quickly informed by the latest science.

The right tools and the right hands

The funding announced today, awarded through the CFI’s Innovation Fund, will support research across Canada, ranging from harnessing the renewable power of tidal currents, to rehabilitating people with traumatic brain injuries and building the world’s first quantum computer.

“The University of Manitoba has a 140-year legacy of leading our province in research, scholarly works and creative activities: this new funding continues that tradition,” said Digvir Jayas, Vice-President (Research and International) and Distinguished Professor, University of Manitoba.

This fund aims to put the right tools in the hands of the country’s scientists so they can discover, innovate and train their students for the jobs of tomorrow. By doing so, scientists are contributing to building a bolder, brighter future for all Canadians, one that includes a strong and healthy middle class.

“Our government understands that scientists need to have the best labs and tools if they’re going to make discoveries that will pave the way to a brighter future for all people. That’s why today’s funding announcement is so important; it gives scientists and their students the opportunity to further their research in areas where Canada has a competitive advantage,” Minister Duncan said. “The discoveries, innovations and skills developed in these new, state-of-the-art labs will go a long way in improving our lives, our economy and our future prosperity.”