9600294 Moon This award supports a 12 month Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Fellowship for Dr. Jon K. Moon to work at Kumamoto University Medical School, Kumamoto, Japan. Dr. Moon will collaborate with Dr. Hidenori Terasaki, Chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology, on a project entitled: "Pressurized Gas Transport for Intravascular Oxygenation'. The proposed research will consist of building an efficient intravascular oxygenator (artificial lung) to provide life support while allowing damaged lungs to heal and will focus on developing materials and techniques for the pressurized transport of oxygen into blood. Drs. Terasaki and Moon propose to exploit the high strength and nonlinear gas- transport behavior of recently developed microporous materials. Although these materials can withstand high internal pressures, they have been used only under negative pressure in earlier oxygenator designs. As positive pressure can substantially increase oxygen delivered to the blood, thermal-mass flow controllers, originally developed for the semiconductor industry, will be used to measure the pressure to flow relationship of microporous materials when immersed in water, albumin plus water, and blood. Data from the experiments will be developed into a mathematical model to predict the "bubble-point pressure" of an implanted oxygenator and, following this analysis, prototypes of extracorporeal and intravascular oxygenators will be constructed for tests in animals by the researchers in the laboratory. ***
