Project Grant K23HL189267

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute awarded the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill $200,137 on September 1, 2026, under the Cardiovascular Diseases Research program (CFDA 93.837) to develop non-invasive tools for assessing aspiration risk in infants with swallowing dysfunction.

The project will refine and validate clinical scoring tools based on observable feeding variables and develop artificial intelligence-enabled cervical auscultation methods to detect aspiration during feeding. The work involves a prospective study at UNC Children's Hospital enrolling 150 infants undergoing videofluoroscopic swallow studies for suspected dysphagia. Researchers will conduct standardized clinical feeding evaluations and record cervical auscultation data using a wearable, multimodal digital stethoscope during swallow studies. The study will standardize human interpretation protocols for cervical auscultation recordings and train machine learning models to predict aspiration using multimodal auscultation data, validated against videofluoroscopic findings as the reference standard.

The award addresses the clinical gap created by limited access to instrumental swallow studies—videofluoroscopic swallow studies and fiberoptic endoscopic evaluation of swallowing—which require trained specialists, incur high costs, and present safety concerns. The project aims to provide scalable, non-invasive methods to improve pulmonary outcomes in at-risk infant populations, including those born prematurely or experiencing respiratory distress.

Performance occurs in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The period of performance runs through June 30, 2031.