UT Tyler Faculty to Investigate Signs of Opioid Exposure in Infants

March 17, 2022

UT Tyler Faculty to Investigate Signs of Opioid Exposure in Infants

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March 17, 2022

Media Contact: Beverley Golden
Senior Director of Media Relations
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The University of Texas at Tyler
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The University of Texas at Tyler announced today that faculty within the College of Engineering have received National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding to study signs of opioid exposure in infants.

Premananda Indic, PhD, UT Tyler associate professor of electrical engineering, and Pravitha Ramanand, PhD, UT Tyler assistant research professor of electrical engineering, received an $861,744 subaward to support a University of Alabama at Birmingham project, “Vital Signs in Opioid Exposed Neonates.”

“There is an ongoing epidemic of opioid use during pregnancy,” said Namasivayam Ambalavanan, MD, principal investigator, a University of Alabama at Birmingham professor and Virginia Walker Jones Endowed Chair in Neonatology. “Babies exposed to opioids before birth often develop neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome (NOWS) and are at higher risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). However, the challenge is to identify such signs early in life.”

Pioneering work conducted by the team has identified that patterns of heart rate and breathing as early as the first day after birth can be used to identify infants who later develop signs of opioid withdrawal.

“The research may also lead to the more accurate management of drug therapy using objective cardiorespiratory data,” said Indic, who also directs the UT Tyler Center for Health Informatics and Analytics (CHIA). “The outcomes of this project could also be used by clinicians to identify infants with sleep-disordered breathing who may benefit from home monitoring.”

Indic and Ambalavanan have collaborated for the past six years on the NIH-funded “PreVENT” project that centered on sleep apnea and slow heart rate in extreme preterm infants, and have now extended their expertise to this different high-risk population.

In this five-year opioid study, the investigators will apply advanced data analytics to prospectively define and validate cardiorespiratory patterns. Machine and deep learning methodologies will be used to predict the onset and severity of NOWS, as well as abnormal sleep-disordered breathing a few months following birth. The results of this research may help with earlier identification of NOWS, facilitating quicker initiation of therapy in infants at high risk, while allowing infants at very low risk to be discharged sooner, according to Indic.

As CHIA director, Indic leads the development of a wearable sensor system and associated machine learning algorithms for the prediction of life-threatening events in humans. Current research focuses on developing such a system for the detection of cravings in individuals with substance use disorder, detection of suicidal ideation in individuals with mental health conditions and prediction of life-threatening events in preterm infants.
Serving UT Tyler since 2016, Indic is a 2018 recipient of UT System’s Science and Technology Acquisition and Retention (STARs) Award, which recognizes outstanding faculty and helps foster research within UT System. He completed his postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School and is currently a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Ramanand joined UT Tyler in January 2022. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow in Henry Ford Hospital’s neuro-magnetism laboratory and completed postdoctoral training in biomedical signal processing and modeling at both UT Tyler and the University of Kentucky.

With a mission to improve educational and healthcare outcomes for East Texas and beyond, UT Tyler offers more than 80 undergraduate and graduate programs to 10,000 students. UT Tyler recently merged with The University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler (now known as the UT Tyler Health Science Center). Through its alignment with the UT Tyler Health Science Center (HSC) and UT Health East Texas, UT Tyler has unified these entities to serve Texas with quality education, cutting-edge research and excellent patient care. Classified by Carnegie as a doctoral research institution and by U.S. News & World Report as a national university, UT Tyler has campuses in Tyler, Longview, Palestine and Houston.