Congratulations to Gene Kim, Ph.D., Professor of Biomedical Engineering in Radiology, on receiving a $5.2 million NIH R61 grant, “Development and Clinical Translation of RPBM for Quantitative Assessment of Myofascial Pain.”
Dr. Kim, the contact PI for the new grant, hopes to develop and evaluate the clinical potential of quantitative imaging biomarkers for masticatory myofascial pain syndrome (MMPS), a condition affecting nearly 10% of Americans. Despite many proposed MMPS treatments, the lack of a reliable, non-invasive tool to assess changes in myofiber microstructure has hindered the evaluation of current treatments and the development of new myofascial pain therapies. Dr. Kim hopes to change this.
Using time-dependent diffusion tensor-imaging methods with the Random Permeable Barrier Model (RPBM), developed by Dr. Kim and his collaborators at New York University, the team will derive biomarkers — myofiber diameter, sarcolemma permeability, and sarcomere length scale — from muscle-diffusion tensor-imaging data at varying diffusion times. Dr. Gene Kim's project focuses on refining masticatory muscle data acquisition and analysis methods, evaluating their diagnostic performance for myofascial pain, and assessing MMPS treatment response.