Lipscomb professor wins Nightingale Prize for biomagnetism research
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The International Federation of Medical & Biological Engineering (IFMBE) has awarded Dr. L. Alan Bradshaw, associate professor of physics and engineering at Lipscomb University, the Nightingale Prize for the best paper published in its official journal in 2005. Bradshaw, a faculty member in Lipscomb’s Raymond B. Jones School of Engineering, teaches engineering students, general physics courses and freshman seminars as well as conducting his research at the Gastrointestinal (GI) SQUID Technology Lab at Vanderbilt University.
The Nightingale Prize, named for Alfred Nightingale, one of the early leaders of the IFMBE, is presented annually for the paper the editorial team judges to be the best published in the Journal of Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing the previous year. Bradshaw was chosen by the journal to travel to England in September to accept the award.
Bradshaw wrote the paper with four collaborators who work with him at the Vanderbilt GI lab, one of the few laboratories in the world that measures the tiny magnetic fields produced by electrical activity in the gastrointestinal system.
“We’re thrilled that our paper was recognized as the best of the year,” said Bradshaw who submitted the paper along with Drs. Andrew Myers, Bill Richards, Bill Drake and John Wikswo. “This journal publishes research by a number of highly respected scientists in our field, so it is great honor to be singled out as exemplary among them.”
In Bradshaw’s research at Vanderbilt, he uses a Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID) to measure the magnetic fields that the stomach and other smooth-muscle organs emit, Bradshaw said. The SQUID can detect magnetic fields one million times weaker than the Earth’s magnetic field.
Since 2000, Bradshaw has been awarded two grants from the National Institutes of Health, totaling nearly $2 million to work on developing a system of diagnosing stomach disorders non-invasively. He began his work at the GI biomagnetism lab in 1993 and earned his doctorate from Vanderbilt University in 1995. He began teaching at Lipscomb in 1998.
“He is one of our top teachers in the college, with a great ability to relate well to both non-science and engineering students by bringing his cutting-edge research topics in medicine into the classroom in an exciting way,” said Ben Hutchinson, Lipscomb’s Dean of the College of Natural and Applied Sciences.
Bradshaw sought out a faculty position at Lipscomb in order to teach undergraduates on a regular basis, a situation unusual for most researchers of his caliber, said Hutchinson.
Bradshaw and his colleagues in the GI biomagnetism lab are learning to identify specific types of stomach and intestinal disorders by measuring changes in the magnetic fields produced by these organs. The journal article, titled “Vector Projection of Biomagnetic Fields,” outlined a better way to process the SQUID recordings to distinguish magnetic fields from stomach and intestine, Bradshaw said. The paper also showed that the technique could separate magnetic signals from a fetal heart from that of the mother.
It’s another step in the process toward the ultimate goal, to develop an electronic system to diagnose stomach problems the same way doctors diagnose heart problems today. “The GI system is very similar to the heart,” Bradshaw said. “If you have a heart attack, the first thing they do is slap electrodes on you and look at the electrocardiogram.”
He hopes to someday provide the same type of monitoring system for gastric diseases such as mesenteric ischemia, which cuts off the blood flow to the intestines. Currently there is no solid way to diagnose the disease without performing surgery on a patient. Someday , the SQUID technology will allow surgeons to know better when they need to operate on patients with gastrointestinal ailments.