Challenges in swallowing assessment: Opportunities for engineering partnerships?

The seminar 'Challenges in swallowing assessment: Opportunities for engineering partnerships?' will take place on Tuesday 14 February at 2 p.m. in the room 3 of the Polo Sant'Anna Valdera. The speaker will be Catriona M. Steele (KITE Research Institute and University of Toronto, Canada). Click here to join via Microsoft Teams.

Abstract

Swallowing is something that we all take for granted, but it is an extraordinarily complex act, requiring reconfiguration of the oropharynx from a pathway for breathing into a pathway for ingestion, and involving a sequence of coordinated muscle contraction across more than 30 pairs of muscles. Current instrumental methods for swallowing assessment face several challenges including the use of radiation; limits in temporal and spatial resolution; the representation of 3-dimensional activity to 2-dimensional images; the inability to simultaneously capture relevant information regarding structural movement, bolus movement, respiratory behaviour and pressure-flow dynamics; and the time required for analysis. In this presentation, Professor Steele will explore some of these challenges as opportunities for multi-disciplinary collaboration and problem solving between dysphagia clinical researchers and engineers.

Biography

Catriona M. Steele is a clinician scientist working in the area of swallowing and swallowing disorders. She has a background as a medical speechlanguage pathologist, and is Director of the Swallowing Rehabilitation Research Laboratory (www.steeleswallowinglab.ca) at the KITE Research Institute, the research arm of the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute – tUniversity Health Network. Dr. Steele is a Professor in the Department of Speech-Language Pathology at the University of Toronto and holds a Canada Research Chair in Swallowing and Food Oral Processing.
Professor Steele holds research funding from the National Institutes of Health (USA) as well as several active industry partnerships. A full list of her publications can be accessed at https://www.orcid.org/0000-0002-4294-6561. She is an associate editor for the Dysphagia journal and a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Texture Studies.