In this first of a five-part series, we trace the research journey of five Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering (BCOE) students who applied their research and technical skills to transform a Senior Design project into a nationally-recognized design that innovates the way that hearing loss is measured. With the goal of getting the Optical Coherence Tomography and Vibrometry Endoscope (OCTAVE) into clinics, hospitals, and surgery centers and launching a start-up, we trace team members' experiences and the crucial factors — such as faculty mentorship and industry support — that paved the way from project to prototype to tomorrow's product.
Inside a BCOE student-design breakthrough
Bioengineering team earns national acclaim after revamping a device that measures hearing loss
More than 200: That’s the number of device components redesigned — five to six times apiece — by undergraduate bioengineering students who spent months revamping a probe that could revolutionize how clinicians assess middle-ear disease and hearing loss.
Piece by piece, the group transformed a large, cumbersome prototype into a sleek, intuitive tool for clinicians.
(Think: the difference between an early IBM computer and a smartphone, said project captain Chris Clark).
The team — over the course of the 2023-24 school year at the UC Riverside Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering (BCOE) — built a smaller Optical Coherence Tomography and Vibrometry Endoscope, or OCTAVE. The probe provides images of the inner ear more precisely than do alternatives such as computed tomography (CT) scans.
The students’ breakthrough earned a second-place National Institutes of Health (NIH) Design by Biomedical Undergraduate (DEBUT) Award for excellence in biomedical design and innovation, conferred in October at the Biomedical Engineering Society’s annual conference in Baltimore.
“I never expected to get recognized in the NIH DEBUT competition, let alone get second place.” Clark said. “That came as a huge surprise to me.”
Teammate Briana Marquez said about the conference, “I was proud to see how far we’ve all come. I was very proud to see it all come together at the end and how well we were able to present ourselves and our product.”
The team’s BCOE faculty mentors, Hyle Park, associate professor of bioengineering, and Rob McKee, assistant professor of teaching, also took pride in the group.
“The NIH award validates the tremendous effort that this team put into their project throughout the year and demonstrates that our students are capable of achieving at a level meriting national recognition,” Park said.
The award-winning BCOE senior design team was comprised of:
§ Chris Clark, now a graduate student researcher in Park’s lab, earning an M.S. in Bioengineering.
§ Sofia Gandarilla, a recent BCOE graduate, now a medical school applicant and behavioral therapist.
§ Briana Marquez, a BCOE graduate and education training associate at AtriCure, an Ohio-based medical device company.
§ Minh-Huy (Huy) Tran, a BCOE graduate and junior specialist at UC Riverside's Biomedical Microdevices Laboratory.
§ Alexis Valencia, a graduate student researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, earning an M.S. in Computational Biomedical Engineering.
The OCTAVE prototype, developed in Park’s lab, uses a box of lasers, mirrors, and lenses to image middle-ear structure. Remaking the probe was a design project nestled within the Park lab’s broader research into Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) vibrometry.
The NIH recognition “showed me that our project is worthy of becoming an actual medical device that could improve health care,” Valencia said. “It showed me that I can bring products to the world that will benefit society.”
Indeed, the goal, over time, is to get the device to thousands of clinics, hospitals, surgery centers, and Veterans Affairs (VA) facilities nationwide — possibly through a nascent medical device startup company — and drive better treatment for those who live with hearing loss.
“OCT could become a routine diagnostic tool for all patients visiting Audiology for hearing tests, similar to the standard use of otoscopes or microscopes,” said Wei Dong, research scientist at VA Loma Linda Healthcare System and professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at Loma Linda University.
OCTAVE began as a collaboration between Dong's laboratory at VA Loma Linda Healthcare System, where her studies have given her detailed knowledge of the workings of the middle ear and the clinical difficulties in measuring conducive hearing loss, and Park's lab at BCOE.
The students focused on the bioengineering aspects of OCTAVE while learning the value of combining problems in clinical medicine with bioengineering, said Dong, who served as the group's academic sponsor through her VA Rehabilitation Research Development Merit Review Award and VA Building Regions Associate Veterans Experience funding.
She added that OCTAVE could help diagnose conditions such as eardrum perforation and spontaneous healing, ear infections (otitis media), and abnormal bone growth (otosclerosis). It could also track the progress of hearing-loss treatment.
In making the probe more clinician-friendly, the students moved OCTAVE closer to that vision.
McKee, who handpicked the student team, described a rigorous selection process in which Clark, Gandarilla, Marquez, Tran, and Valencia outcompeted 84 other applicants.
“It was very clear from the application that these five were the ideal fit for the project," he said.
The group came together, surpassed expectations, and delivered nationally recognized design quality. In subsequent stories, they share insight into the design project’s inception, evolution, and completion; their BCOE mentors and academic sponsor at VA (Veterans Affairs) Loma Linda; the secret sauce factors behind their extraordinary team success; and of course, what comes next.
About OCTAVE
Wei Dong, a research scientist at VA Loma Linda Health System and professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at Loma Linda University, explains how the probe works to measure conductive (middle ear) hearing loss:
“To address the limitations of current diagnostic techniques, we developed an OCT (Optical Coherence Tomography) functional imaging endoscope that can be inserted into the EAM (external acoustic meatus, or ear canal). OCT transmits a near-infrared laser at a sample that reflects some of that light back into the system. The reflections are measured and reconstructed to produce an image. In general, these systems are capable of imaging at resolutions of 10 to 15 microns. Additionally, when the sample is vibrating, the reflected light experiences a Doppler shift that the system can measure to quantify the amplitude and frequency of the vibration. For middle ear imaging, this probe can depict the shape and features of the middle ear structures while also quantifying the ability of each component to conduct sound. Currently, no devices combine these functions with this degree of precision.”