Day 6

When I arrived at the lab today, I walked into the area where I normally sit and saw three people I didn't know sitting there. At first I assumed they were all summer students; only one of them was. The other two were a researcher and subject involved in a very cool study involving DDR (yes, Dance Dance Revolution). The study is researching how DDR can be used as effective therapy in Parkinsons patients. The theory is that DDR has about the same amount of physical exertion as standard Treadmill Training does. Treadmill Training involves having the patient walk on a treadmill while their weight is supported by a harness. Eventually, they begin to support more and more of their own weight and increase their speed. The problem with TT is that it is boring and it is difficult to see immediate improvements. On the surface, DDR training solves both of these issues: it is engaging, and after each song you are given a score that tells you exactly how you did. Additionally, it is theorized that DDR will actually work better than TT because it involves additional coding. The example I was given today, was this: in the brain, different areas are all connected. Say, for example, area A is connected to B, and B is connected to C. As a result, A is connected to C through B. In Parkinsons patients, B is broken, so A and C are no longer connected. The brain must find an alternate pathway to connect the two areas (often motor areas). TT does this by forcing the legs to work, which then forces the brain to make new connections to compensate (often the therapist will have to physically move the patient's legs themselves). This often takes a long time because very few areas of the brain are working together. With DDR, the motor functions (pushing the arrows on the pad) are accompanied by both visual stimuli (arrows on the screen) and audio stimuli (the music). In this way, the motor system, visual system, auditory system, as well as others are all working together to forge new pathways in the brain.
At this point in the study, they are working on getting their control data. Additionally, they are using the control subjects to prepare for using actual Parkinsons patients later this summer. They have two control groups at the moment: healthy young subjects and healthy elderly subjects. I believe the reason for this is to get a true set of control data (young and healthy) and then get a more similar control group to the experimental group (elderly and healthy).
The subject that was being run today was a young, healthy woman, back for her second round of scanning. Each subject is scanned multiple times. First, they are scanned before any DDR training is done. This gives each person a baseline scan. The scan has 11 parts. First, the subject gets a basic structural scan (this only happens in the first set of scans). Next, the subject gets a basic DTI scan. Then the DDR tasks start. While in the scanner, the subject has a foot pad that has two buttons. In the next group of scans, the subject plays DDR using these two buttons. In scan three, the subject plays a normal round of DDR, except for the fact that when round symbols come up on the screen, they do not press the buttons. In scan four, the subject must press the buttons in time with the music (left, right, left, right). In scans five and six are exactly the same as three and four, just without the music. The next five scans are exactly the same as scans 2-6. They do this so they can be sure they have accurate data. After a month or so (and approximately 35+ hours of DDR training) the subjects come back to the lab and do that same set of scans again. I believe there is only one follow-up scan. The whole experiment takes forever!
I very much like the concept of this study, however I did have one issue: in the trials with no music, the factor of subjects imagining the music in their head is ignored. I feel that this is a HUGE confound that needs to be taken into account in some way. Adam (the guy running the study) said that they had been trying to think of a way to account for it, but had not figured one out yet.
After watching the first run of the scans (scans 1-5) I went back to get some of my own work done, and once I helped the other summer students with various computer issues, I was able to do that. FSL (the program I am learning) is REALLY cool. It is really nice to finally see some real brains! I started off doing some viewing of images and other basic maneuvers in the program. Some of the notation in the software is really confusing. For example, every scan, no matter what type, has an Intensity value for each voxel. Depending on the type of scan, this Intensity value means something completely different, so you just have to know what it means in each scan you are looking at. It's pretty annoying. The coolest thing I found today, though, was the Atlas tool. The atlas tool allows you to point to any area in a normalized brain (a template brain) and it will tell you what that part of the brain is (ie. thalamus, amygdala, putamen, etc.). You can even set it up to highlight all of the areas in whatever atlases you choose. For the rest of my time there today I just turned on the highlighting for different atlases and learned where different parts of the brain are, how big they are, etc. It was really cool! Tomorrow I need to make a lot more of a dent is the FSL tutorial so that I can start working on the script with Spiro.