Rice bioengineer wins international design contest

DATE: March 4, 2004
CONTACT: Jade Boyd
PHONE: (713) 348-6778
EMAIL: jadeboyd@rice.edu

RICE BIOENGINEER
WINS INTERNATIONAL DESIGN CONTEST
Liebschner’s OsteoSonic™ Takes Grand Prize in "Create the Future"
Design Contest

Rice bioengineer Michael
Liebschner has been named the grand prize winner in the "Create The Future"
Design Contest sponsored by NASA Tech Briefs magazine, Emhart Teknologies
and SolidWorks Corp.

Liebschner, assistant
professor of bioengineering, won the contest for designing the OsteoSonic™,
a non-invasive damage detection system that will help doctors better diagnose
bone fractures and bone loss that results from osteoporosis. As the grand
prize winner, Liebschner wins either $20,000 cash or a Toyota Prius hybrid
automobile.

Liebschner received
the grand prize trophy at a Feb. 23 gala in Chicago. The OsteoSonic™
and other winning inventions will be featured in a special supplemental issue
of NASA Tech Brief’s in April. The contest attracted more than 1,100
entries from engineering professionals, students, and the general public from
more than 30 countries.

"The competition
for this award was tremendous, so I am extremely honored to have been selected
the grand prize winner," said Liebschner, director of Rice’s Computational
and Experimental Biomechanics Laboratory. "This award reflects well on
all of the talented students and researchers who are working on translational
research in the bioengineering and bioscience field at Rice."

Liebschner’s
device uses acoustic waves to measure the structural integrity of bone. This
offers advantages over existing radiological diagnostics that are used to
measure bone density because it measures the actual structural integrity of
the bone rather than a two-dimensional cross section of the bone density.
Testing of the system is currently underway at Rice.

In partnership with Liebschner, John Osborne, an MBA student at Rice’s
Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, is in the process of establishing
a startup company to develop the OsteoSonic™. Production of a prototype
is expected within a year, and mass production is expected within two to five
years.

NASA Tech Briefs,
the largest U.S.-circulation engineering magazine, is a monthly publication
featuring exclusive reports of innovations developed by NASA and its industry
partners/contractors.

Authored by the engineers
or scientists who did the work, the briefs span a wide array of fields, including
electronics, physical sciences, materials, computer software, mechanics, machinery/automation,
manufacturing/fabrication, mathematics/information sciences, and life sciences.

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