Swallowtail Professor - For the first time, Swallowtail provides dysphagia educators with an easy-to-use tool for teaching swallowing biomechanics and biokinetics. Swallowtail demonstrates the value of systematic, quantitative analysis in dysphagia assessment.
Elucidate - Swallowtail can allow you to quickly elucidate for students differences between normal and impaired swallowing mechanics.
Objective Evaluation - Since Swallowtail provides an objective method for analyzing swallowing biomechanics, it offers an objective method to evaluate students’ knowledge of swallowing.
Multiple Levels - Swallowtail can easily be adapted to multiple educational and experience levels, from beginning master’s students just introduced to normative swallowing biomechanics, to advanced doctoral candidates who can use Swallowtail to explore disease specific manifestations of dysphagia, compare patient populations within or across different dysphagia etiologies, or elaborate normal swallow mechanics and characteristics.
Thesis or Dissertation Tool - Swallowtail can provide your graduate students with a powerful and elegant (primary or supplemental) research tool useful at any educational level.
Swallowtail - Research Version
Quantitative Analysis - Swallowtail is the first product in the world to make quantitative analysis of VFS Studies easy, fast, reproducible and affordable.
Scientific Data - Swallowtail can provide the scientific data for evidence-based medicine, output in either tabular or graphic format.
Larger Study “n’s” - Because of Swallowtail’s ease of use and speed of analysis, researchers can include larger numbers of investigated subjects, thus improving the statistical power of their research.
Baseline Physiology - Swallowtail can be used to establish a baseline of swallowing physiology, for individuals and groups, to which subsequent changes can be compared.
Large Normative Database - Swallowtail includes normative measurement data derived from VFSS tests of healthy individuals grouped by age and sex.
Multi-Center Research - Because Swallowtail has been designed to make quantitative analysis reproducible, multi- center studies can be conducted with the knowledge that cross-institutional measures can be reliably obtained.
Automated Measures - For specific measurements that are time-consuming to reproduce by hand, sophisticated mathematical algorithms are being developed that will make reproducibility fast and accurate.
Standardization - Swallowtail allows VFS Study protocols and measurements to be standardized, in a specific research lab, or in multiple labs.
Customization - Swallowtail allows you to customize your protocols and measurement methodologies to suit specific research requirements and projects.
Improve the Quality of Research - By enabling quantitative, reproducible analyses, Swallowtail has the potential to significantly improve the quality of dysphagia research involving fluoroscopy.
Grant Funding - The inclusion of quantitative analysis tools in oral-pharyngeal dysphagia research involving fluoroscopy is likely to appeal to grant application reviewers, possibly increasing the likelihood of funded research proposals.