Infant Metabolic Chamber Analysis
Authors: Thomas Ayton, Sonia Azad, Zachary Bradshaw, Joshua Brock, Matthew Cabrera, Taylor Daigle, Rohin Gilman, Logan Hart, Shelby Hust, Timothy Mann, Marie Neubrander, Sima Sobhiyeh
Our group collaborated with Dr. Nicholas Broskey and Abby Altazan, researchers at Pennington Biomedical Research Center, to streamline their analysis of data obtained from an Infant Metabolic Chamber, a calorimetry device designed to measure an infant's metabolic rate. Dr. Broskey and Duhé were originally doing all analysis manually in Excel, our objective was to automate their analysis, allowing the researches more time to consider the implications of their data. Using MATLAB, our team created a graphical user interface or GUI to suit the researchers' needs.
We began by creating functions to do all calculations and write all data to Excel. Once completed we proceeded with doing analysis on user specified data sets. We created a set of functions that allows a user to label data with built in tags. Once the data is labelled to the users content, analysis is then done on the sets and the user is then allowed to create graphs using the tagged sets. Once the user has specified which graphs they want the tagged data is then saved into Excel along with the corresponding graphs.
Originally, the researchers spent about an hour doing their analysis through Excel, but with our improvements they can be done in less than 10 minutes.