THE POWER OF MATH LSU MATH STUDENTS Create a Detection Interface to Help Pennington Biomedical Researchers Measure INFANT SUCKING BEHAVIOR BY PAIGE JARREAU
LSU Professor of Mathematics Peter Wolenski (third from the right) and his research team for the infant sucking behavior project: Zhaoxia “Mary” Wang, Zachary Bradshaw, Abby Duhe Altazan, Jerome Weston, Hugo Leiva, Brandon Dellucky, and Sima Sobhiyeh
I
n the summer of 2016, a group of LSU undergraduate and graduate math students developed and implemented a program in the computing environment MatLab that measured infant sucking behavior. The main idea behind this research project is that if infants aren’t properly nourished at a very early age, their brains may
continue to demand more nourishment even when they don’t need it as they get older. It is conjectured that this could be a cause or at least contribute to the widespread occurrence of obesity. Abby Altazan and Dr. Leanne Redman are researchers at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center and were collecting data to test this idea. They have a novel bottle device with a pressure sensor to record the infant’s sucking behavior. But the data collection and subsequent analytic tools provided by the device’s manufacturer were seemingly unreliable and extremely complicated. They sought guidance by contacting Professor Peter Wolenski, who runs the Mathematical Consultation Clinic (MCC) in the LSU Math department. “They had a device that would measure an infant suck signals during bottle feeding,” Wolenski said. “But the Matlab [math software] program designed for the device was very clunky. The researchers didn’t know exactly how the analysis was working, and it didn’t appear to be working correctly or even consistently.” Professor Wolenski had created the MCC several years ago with the goal of creating a unit on campus for creation of personalized software for various clients in collaboration with undergraduate and graduate students. Students in MATH 4020, a capstone course within the LSU Math program, are assigned a semester-long project through the clinic. When Pennington Biomedical researchers contacted Wolenski about issues with their infant suck detection
26 | THE PURSUIT 2017
device, he assigned a team of students to create a solution over the course of the summer. The project was supported by a Board of Regents grant. “Undergraduate math majors are actually very well-equipped to analyze and organize data in ways that researchers can use it,” Wolenski said. “Research data is almost always a mathematical formulation.” Over the summer, the group of 12 students met every day to at first brainstorm and then implement an algorithm and user interface to help Pennington Biomedical researchers collect better and more reliable data related to infant sucking behavior. Within 10 weeks, the team designed a user-friendly software tool that imports and