Day 4

I woke up this morning to an email from Spiro (the grad student I'm working with) saying that he was most likely coming in to the lab around 3 because the water was being turned off in his apartment from 11 to 2. (He also said there was a possibility that he would wake up early and be in by 11:30, but I knew that would never happen). In his email, he went on to say that, if I was interested, he would tell me about the work that he is doing now (which I had shown some interest in) and discuss some further tasks that could contribute greatly to research in this field. Spiro is working on neurological graph theory (kind of like brain mapping but more). His study is based on seeing what parts of the brain activate in response to fear (stimulus is a face showing the fear emotion) and how those parts are connected. He used people with social anxiety disorders as his experimental group. In his research, he has identified nodes in the brain (I have no idea if they are specific areas or specific neurons. I'll hopefully find out soon.) and has compiled a list of which nodes make connections with other nodes. (That isn't all he has done, but for what I'm doing, that's mostly what is important.) My task in all of this is to help develop a script that can, from what I understand, determine the number of connections per node and then project that information onto the brain using a color spectrum scale. (There is a more scientific name for "color spectrum scale", I just can't remember it now.) At the moment, all I can really do is start learning how to use FSL and SPM (two brain image reading programs) and how to script in MATLAB, but eventually (soon) I will be working with Spiro to create this script. Now, the coolest part about this is that this script is extremely important to graph theory research, so it is possible that if I contribute a good amount to this project, my name may be included in papers relating to it!!!

In regards to the DTI research we started running yesterday, I finally got to see some actual data! We finished running all of the scripts we needed to run on the preliminary data, and I got to see the results. (Quick note, the scripts we are running on this data must be run when all the data is present, which it was not yesterday. We did a practice run of the data using only ten of the 27 subjects, so the results we found weren't really results, just pretty cool brain scans.) The experiment is seeing what parts of the brain differ between highly skilled musicians and non-musicians. In the final images, we saw an averaged version of all the data projected onto one "normalized" brain. (I know it sounds weird, but I swear it works) All of the white matter tracks show up as green. Once the experimental conditions are added, some of the green either turns red or blue. The red areas show areas in which the FA value (density of white matter) is larger in the experimental group over to control group, and the blue areas show area in which the FA value is larger in the control group. (A larger FA value essentially means that the area in question has more neuronal development.) After we saw that all the data was processed correctly, we started to run the scripts on all the data. We should see those results on Monday.

On Monday, the rest of the summer students arrive. I'm excited to meet all the people I will be working with over the summer. I'm also really happy that I got here early, because I already have a project that I chose, while most of the other summer students are just assigned someone to work with based on a brief summary of their interests. Monday should be a good day!

I also finally downloaded MATLAB today as well as FSL and SPM. Now I can look at brains on my computer! FSL has a very cool way to view the brain: the Orthographic view. When viewing a brain, the orthographic view gives you three windows, each viewing the brain from a different plane (x, y, z. or for anyone who has taken BCS 110, horizontal, sagittal, and coronal.) When you click on any area of the image on any of the planes, the other two images adjust to show that area. It's pretty cool. There is also a 3D view of the brain, but I haven't figured out how to use that yet.