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NIH Grant Will Fund UH Engineer's Study of Epileptic Seizures in Newborns
By
Tara Wijnanda Mullee, Public Relations Intern
John R. Glover, Professor of Electrical Engineering
John R. Glover, Professor of Electrical Engineering

Electrical Engineering Professor John R. Glover has won a $600,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to study epileptic seizures in newborn babies over the next four years. The research will take place in collaboration with researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine and The Methodist Hospital.

Although his basic area of expertise is intelligent, or rule-based, signal processing, Glover said he has always liked biomedical applications. He chose to study newborns because, while considerable progress has been made in the automated detection of seizures in adults, relatively little work has been done in the neonatal area.

"Detecting seizures in neonates is a difficult problem. We decided to tackle it," says Glover. "Our goal is to develop a reliable system for automated detection of neonatal seizures that people would want to use and would trust as a screening system."

The current screening system is a time-consuming process involving long-term EEG monitoring and the visual interpretation of graphic records. Glover proposes a multi-stage, hybrid approach using a combination of signal processing, pattern recognition, neural networks and expert rules. During each stage, multi-channel neonatal EEG data will be analyzed to detect and classify electrographic seizures.

Glover expects that the information he collects from the research will not only lead to the development of a practical seizure detection system but also will reduce the cost of reading and interpreting neonatal EEGs. The information may also prove useful in future seizure research studies.

Glover, the project's principal investigator, will collaborate with UH electrical engineering professor Periklis Y. Ktonas, UH associate professor Nicolaos Karayiannis, and with the Baylor College of Medicine's Dr. Eli Mizrahi, Dr. Richard Hrachovy and Dr. James Frost.

Glover joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at UH in 1975. He earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University and his B.A. and M.E.E. degrees from Rice University.

From 1971 to 1974 Glover served as a National Science Foundation Fellow at Stanford University, and in 1981 he received the Outstanding Transactions Paper Award from the IEEE Education Society. Glover's research and teaching areas include bioelectrical signal processing, adaptive signal processing, knowledge-based systems, computers in education and object-oriented programming.

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