Federal Grant Award Summary

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) awarded a $244,740 Project Grant to the University of California, San Diego on September 30, 2026, under the Research Related to Deafness and Communication Disorders program (CFDA 93.173). The project, titled "Multidimensional Analysis of Cochlear Pathology in Sensorineural Hearing Loss," will be performed through June 30, 2029, and focuses on developing artificial intelligence-driven tools and methodologies to advance understanding of hearing loss mechanisms at the subcellular level.

The grant supports the development and release of open-source computational pipelines, trained machine learning models, and annotated datasets that automate high-resolution quantification of cochlear hair cell synapses and stereocilia across noise-induced and age-related hearing loss models. Deliverables include three primary research aims: extension of three-dimensional segmentation and morphological analysis tools; in vivo quantification of synapse dynamics using advanced labeling techniques; and development of machine learning models that correlate subcellular structural features with non-invasive auditory functional measurements. All outputs will be released under permissive open-source licenses with comprehensive documentation and user tutorials, enabling the broader research community to establish structure-function correlations between cochlear pathology and clinical diagnostic assessments.