The Daily Reveille 2-3-16

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Hambrick finds consistency in sophomore season, page 3 OPINION: Partial TOPS cut could alleviate budget issues, page 5 lsunow.com/daily

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2016

thedailyreveille

@lsureveille

FOOTBALL

STRICTLY BUSINESS

Tigers look to finish with No. 1 class

LSU Innovation Park supports emerging businesses

BY JOSHUA THORNTON @JoshT_TDR

BY CAITIE BURKES @caitie1221 LSU’s Office of Research and Economic Development houses the Louisiana Business and Technology Center Innovation Park, a 200-plus-acre research park that includes a five-business incubator system and offers innovators the opportunity to perfect their craft before reaching clientele. In 1988, Charles D’Agostino, a small business owner and entrepreneur, signed an 18-month contract to construct the off-campus research park for community and University researchers and entrepreneurs to nurse their homespun products for the outside marketplace. The LSU Innovation Park raised $18 million in capital and approximately $4.3 million in revenue in 2015. The Emerge Center, spanning 3 acres of the park, employs 50 full time and 70 student interns for autism research and speech training. D’Agostino continues to serve as executive director for both the LBTC and LSU Innovation Park while maintaining his private enterprises. He said his original intent was to go back to his other businesses after starting the research park and incubators. “It’s been so much fun, I’ve come in every day for 27 years,” he said. The LSU business incubators include the Louisiana Emerging Technology Center, the Pennington BioTech Initiative, the LSU Student Incubator, the LSU AgCenter Food Incubator and ProtoStripes, the park’s prototyping lab. The incubators seek to commercialize University research by bringing ideas from labs to the market and creating funding grants and licensing/royalty revenue for the University, according to documents provided

Volume 121 · No. 15

thedailyreveille

GRETA JINES / The Daily Reveille

[Above] LBTC Business Incubator tenant Associated Terminals is developing an automated simulator for the shipping industry. [Below] Executive director for LBTC and LSU Innovation Park Charles D’Agostino displays the ProtoStripes Center’s 3-D printer, which can be used to create a variety of items, including chess pieces.

It’s that time of the year again — national signing day — when the Twitter universe centers around teenagers and fax machines suddenly become relevant again. For the first time since 2009, LSU is in position to finish with the No. 1 class according most recruiting outlets. The Tigers, who currently have 23 commits in their 2016 class, including five early enrollees, will look to bolster their class, which ESPN recruiting writer Jeremy Crabtree called arguably the best class in the modern era. “What makes the class so great is the depth at every position,” said Rivals.com mid-South recruiting analyst Jason Howell in an email to The Daily Reveille. “There’s a lot of speed and athleticism. There are blue chip studs ready to come right in and contribute and there are guys who

see SIGNING DAY, page 4 For live updates of National Signing Day, check out

lsunow.com/daily

see INNOVATION PARK, page 4 RESEARCH

New device to improve prostate cancer screening, detection BY KATIE GAGLIANO @katie_gagliano

Physics professor Guang Jia and medical physics doctoral candidate Joseph Steiner are revolutionizing prostate cancer screening by developing a device to increase accuracy. If successful, their device will produce more accurate CT scans of the prostate and improve prostate cancer diagnoses. Current screening methods, including the prostate-specific antigen test and the digital rectal exam, have a wider margin of error than Jia and Steiner’s proposed technique. PSAs can be released for a variety of prostate diseases,

not only cancer, and DREs may not detect small or obscurely located tumors, Jia said. The device involves attaching an intraoral sensor to an inner rectal coil to produce higher image resolution when used in conjunction with a CT scan. The intraoral sensor is used in dental radiography and inner rectal coils are traditionally used in MRIs, Jia said. “That’s the good thing about what we’re trying to do,” Steiner said. “Everything’s already been done, and we’re just mashing everything together.” Traditional prostate CT scans use a surface coil, which has difficulty producing a detailed image of the prostate because of the

organ’s small size and central location. An internal sensor will localize the CT radiation and produce a clearer image of the prostate, Jia said. “This is like during the day, if there’s a street lamp you might not identify it from the bright sky,” Jia said. “But if you put your eyes very close to the lamp, you cannot ignore it. The detector is our eye, and the prostate is the lamp.” The digital detector has 100 times smaller pixels than a CT scan, producing scans with 10 times higher resolution, Jia said. The device is being tested using an imaging phantom — an

HASKELL WHITTINGTON / The Daily Reveille

see SCREENING, page 4

Physics professor Guang Jia and doctoral candidate Joseph Steiner’s x-ray technique and equipment serve to improve the detection and curing of prostate cancer.


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