CBR member Mohammad-Reza Siadat gets NIH grant

A joint OU-Beaumont research project led by CBR member Mohammad-Reza Siadat, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Ananias Diokno, Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of Beaumont Health System, has resulted in a $644,456 grant from the National Institute on Aging, one of the National Institutes of Health. The collaboration began with an OU-Beaumont Multidisciplinary Research Award titled “Urinary Incontinence Prediction Index for Elderly Women” to Diokno, Siadat, Associate Professor Theophilus Ogunyemi of OU’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and Professor Ishwar Sethi of OU’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Siadat and Ogunyemi presented their initial results at the Oakland University Beaumont Hospitals Biomedical Research Symposium last February. One goal of the OU-Beaumont awards is to encourage external grant proposals, and that strategy proved successful in this case. Diokno and Siadat’s NIH grant will enable them to continue their study of urinary incontinence, a costly condition that causes social isolation and a poor quality of life. Diokno has accumulated a wealth of data over the past two decades from in-depth population-based studies of urinary incontinence. Now Siadat will use his data mining skills to create a urinary continence index that can identify women who are likely to become incontinent over time. This index will promote early prevention and treatment.