Focus Areas

Mayo Clinic researchers work closely with the U.S. Department of Defense and military leadership, contributing significantly to the medical and technological support of active duty personnel, veterans and wounded warriors.

Research conducted through efforts of the Department of Defense Medical Research Office at Mayo Clinic spans a wide range of disciplines. Focus areas of research include:

• Aerospace medicine and vestibular research, including high- and extreme-altitude reactions, acceleration effects, spatial disorientation, and motion and simulator sickness.
• Anesthesia outcomes, including anesthesiology, critical care, pain management, pharmacological consultation, statistical analysis, analytic methodology and budget development.
• Biomechanics and motion analysis, including joint and soft tissue mechanics, gait analysis, prosthetics, surgical outcomes, medical imaging technology, tissue engineering, movement difficulties, limb preservation, and motion training for people with war-related amputations.
• Human integrative physiology, including adaption of peripheral circulation and autonomic reflexes to physical stresses such as standing, exercising or body heating; blood flow to exercising muscles; and physiological responses to orthostatic stress.
• Hyperbaric chamber, including simulating an altitude of up to 100,000 feet, which allows researchers to study the ability to tolerate extreme elevations encountered in commercial flight, suborbital flight and other extreme environments.
• Regenerative neurobiology, including neuroregeneration for spinal cord injury, neuro-oncology, neurorehabilitation and transduction mechanisms mediating bidirectional nerve growth.
• Remote medical monitoring, including a broad-based remote monitoring system that enables continuous or intermittent physiological monitoring and detection of changes arising from a range of medical conditions, even from thousands of miles away.
• Shoulder and elbow injuries, including development and refinement of techniques to repair or reconstruct injured elbows, such as radial head arthroplasty.
• Tendon and soft tissue biology, including tendons and soft tissue injury, lubricant effect, optimal postoperative rehabilitation, appropriate surgical repair and reconstruction techniques, and the role of growth factor on tendon healing and adhesion formation.
• Traumatic brain injury, including socialization, rehabilitation, resilience and reliability testing of assessments.
• Ultrasound imaging, including developing new applications in medical and biological areas, arterial properties from stimulated acoustical emission, combined acoustical imaging and viscoelastic parameters, estimation in breast cancer, measurement of renal viscoelastic properties with ultrasound, and multidimensional heart imaging.
• Vaccines, including serology, cell-mediated immunity, cell culture and cytokine assays; PCR techniques; HLA typing; and high-throughput assays, such as next-generation sequencing, transcriptomics and proteomic analysis.