Emily Lee
Yale University, CT·Medicine & Clinical Research
Each year in the United States, more than 35,000 newborns suffer brain injury at birth because they do not get enough oxygen. Doctors have monitored the fetal heart rate during labor for 60 years, yet the rate of these injuries has not fallen.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biomedical Engineering
Neuroscience
- Topics
fetal electroencephalography
fetal EEG
fEEG
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Aug 2026
What they work on
- Test whether computerized abdominal fetal EEG, which uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to remove maternal and fetal heart, muscle, and movement signals, reconstructs fetal brain activity as accurately as invasive scalp-electrode EEG.
- Quantify reconstruction error between abdominal and vaginal scalp-electrode fetal EEG recorded together from 46 patients in active labor, using regression residuals to measure how closely the signals match.
- Have clinical neurologists who specialize in EEG reading compare the neurological features of abdominal and scalp-electrode fetal EEG, to judge whether the non-invasive signal is clinically equivalent.
More about the research
Heart-rate changes are a downstream sign of brain stress, so they can be slow and misleading. Recording fetal brain waves directly, called fetal electroencephalography (fEEG), has shown abrupt changes up to ten minutes before heart-rate changes in fetuses with dangerously acidic blood. Those ten minutes can matter for preventing lifelong conditions such as cerebral palsy. The only existing method, however, requires electrodes attached to the baby's scalp through the vagina, and it has been abandoned as too invasive.
Why it matters
A validated, non-invasive way to read fetal brain activity during labor could warn clinicians of oxygen deprivation earlier than heart-rate monitoring. Earlier warning could help reduce preventable brain injury at birth, such as cerebral palsy, for newborns and families. The same tool could also open new ways to study human brain development before birth.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Shabnam Peyvandi
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether lower brain tissue oxygen before birth leads to immature brain development in fetuses with transposition of the great arteries, using fetal neuroimaging to find a prenatal marker of poor brain maturation.
Sonya Wang
University of Minnesota, MN·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine the maximum tolerated loading dose of levetiracetam, up to 150 mg/kg, in newborns with mild to moderate seizures through a three-phase dose escalation trial with safety review at each level.
Andres Valdez
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Biomedical Engineering
Assess the translation potential of a voice-based pre-screening tool for RSV, influenza and COVID-19 through I-Corps interviews and first-hand study of the healthcare industry.
The school
Yale University: 73 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 438 research doctorates a year.
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