For example, in an exercise to promote finger flexing speed, a patient wearing a glove tries to make a fist quickly enough to “scare away” a butterfly flitting around on the screen.

So why is this a big deal? Their entire setup cost $600 (did they try Ebay?). Hospitals are using similar systems that cost nearly 10X more. This means that patients can now take the rehab home with them, and through the Xbox’s internet connectivity, they can be monitored by clinicians.

Engineers at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, have modified a popular home video game system to assist stroke patients with hand exercises, producing a technology costing less than $600 that may one day rival systems 10 times as expensive.

The Rutgers hand rehabilitation system is an example of virtual rehabilitation, which combines virtual reality – computer-generated interactive visual environments in which users control actions in a lifelike way – with traditional therapy techniques. Virtual rehabilitation gives therapists new tools to do their jobs more effectively and engages patients who may otherwise lack interest or motivation to complete normal exercise regimens.

The Rutgers engineers are describing their work at the fifth International Workshop on Virtual Rehabilitation taking place Aug. 29 and Aug. 30 in New York City.

“Virtual reality is showing significant promise for promoting faster and more complete rehabilitation, but the cost of many systems is still prohibitive for widespread deployment in outpatient clinics or patients’ homes,” said Grigore Burdea, professor of electrical and computer engineering and a noted inventor of virtual rehabilitation technology. “While it’s essential to keep pursuing breakthrough technologies that will initially be costly, it’s just as important that we find ways to make innovative treatments accessible to the many patients who need them.”

Rutgers’ low-cost hand rehabilitation system is based on the commercially available Microsoft Xbox video game and Essential Reality P5 gaming glove that detects finger and wrist motions to manipulate on-screen images. The engineers made minor modifications to the equipment and created software that delivers two types of finger flexing exercises needed to help recover hand functions in stroke patients.

In one exercise, a patient attempts to wipe clean four vertical bars of “dirty” pixels that obscure a pleasant image on a computer display. The bars are erased in proportion to each finger’s flexing motion, giving the patient immediate feedback on his or her performance. And in an exercise to promote finger flexing speed, a patient tries to make a fist quickly enough to “scare away” a butterfly flitting around on the screen.

The engineers noted that the gaming glove they use doesn’t have the accuracy and resolution of gloves designed specifically for rehabilitation, nor can it measure exact joint movement or provide force feedback. But such systems may be attractive for clinics that can’t afford more expensive equipment and could open the door for supplemental home training with remote monitoring by a clinician over an Internet connection.

The system is described in a workshop paper authored by Kira Morrow, Ciprian Docan and Burdea of Rutgers, and Alma Merians of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

The International Workshop on Virtual Rehabilitation, chaired this year by Burdea, brings together research and clinical experts from 11 countries to discuss how virtual reality can help people recover from strokes, injuries and other physical disorders, as well as psychological trauma. It also features exhibits by eight vendors of commercial rehabilitation equipment and systems using robotics and virtual reality.

Free stuff, great! The Allen Brain Atlas (www.brain-map.org) was just completed today. It’s a free online program that allows scientists to look at a three-dimensional map of gene expression in the mouse brain.

“Since humans share more than 90 percent of their genes with mice, the Atlas offers profound opportunity to further understanding of human disorders and diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, epilepsy, schizophrenia, autism and addiction.“

I took a few minutes to poke around the atlas and it looks pretty interesting. Click on to read the press release, and more about the atlas.

Allen Institute for Brain Science Completes Brain Atlas
Tuesday September 26, 9:30 am ET

Allen Brain Atlas has Enormous Potential to Help Unlock the Mysteries of Neurological Diseases and Disorders Affecting Millions Worldwide

SEATTLE, Sept. 26 /PRNewswire/ — The completion of the Allen Institute for Brain Science’s inaugural project signals a remarkable leap forward in one of the last frontiers of medical science — the brain.The Institute today announced the completion of the groundbreaking Allen Brain Atlas, a Web-based, three-dimensional map of gene expression in the mouse brain. Detailing more than 21,000 genes at the cellular level, the Atlas provides scientists with a level of data previously not available.

Since humans share more than 90 percent of their genes with mice, the Atlas offers profound opportunity to further understanding of human disorders and diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, epilepsy, schizophrenia, autism and addiction. About 26 percent of American adults — close to 58 million people — suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.

“This project is an unprecedented union of neuroscience and genomics,” said philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen, who provided $100 million in seed money to launch the Allen Institute for Brain Science and its first project, the Allen Brain Atlas, in 2003. “The comprehensive information provided by the Atlas will help lead scientists to new insights and propel the field of neuroscience forward dramatically.”

Publicly available at no cost, the map shows which genes are active — or “expressed” — within the brain and which regions and cells they are expressed in, thereby linking them to particular brain functions.

“This is a multidisciplinary project of unprecedented scale,” said Allan Jones, the Institute’s chief scientific officer. “It combines the scientific disciplines of math, physics, neuroscience, and genomics to define where those 21,000 genes are expressed and activated in the brain. There’s no other information set like this.”

Key New Findings About the Brain

The project has already led to several significant new findings about the brain. It reveals that 80 percent of genes are turned on in the brain, much higher than the 60 to 70 percent scientists previously believed.

It indicates that very few genes are turned on in only one region of the brain — paving the way for additional insight about the benefits and potential side effects of drug treatments. And it shows the location of genes associated with specific functions, providing scientists with valuable information about regional brain activity.

“It’s an enormous mine of information. Suddenly you can go into a much more advanced level of analysis,” said Catherine Dulac, a Harvard professor of molecular and cellular biology and a member of the Institute’s scientific advisory board.

“The fact that it is being made publicly available immediately is absolutely tremendous.”

How the Atlas Works

The Atlas gives scientists worldwide the gift of time, providing in one place an enormous database of information that an individual researcher could spend a lifetime trying to gather.

Many of the discrete regions of the brain perform similar functions in all mammals, and greater than 90 percent of all mouse genes have a direct counterpart in humans. By establishing this baseline of the normal mouse brain, the Atlas allows researchers to compare the brain with others altered to mimic neurological and psychiatric diseases found in humans.

Previous atlases have contained anatomic maps showing the location of various regions of the brain, but little or no information about the gene activity within them. Others have contained gene information but none have been nearly as comprehensive as the Atlas, which includes data for every major structure in the brain for nearly all the genes in the genome.

Even before its announced completion, the Atlas was receiving more than 4 million hits monthly and being accessed by approximately 250 scientists on any given work day. Users are not required to provide information about their work, but anecdotal evidence indicates that the Atlas is already assisting research projects.

“I use it around the clock, night and day. My whole lab does,” said Stanford University neurobiology professor Ben A. Barres, who is using the Atlas to confirm his team’s findings about glial cells, a type of non-neuronal cell within the nervous system.

“It’s completely essential. It’s saved us years and years of work, maybe decades. We could never have done all this, either financially or in terms of the amount of labor and time. It was just so incredibly generous of Mr. Allen to do this, and I think it’s hard to even overstate what the payoff is going to be for research.”

Future Steps

Going forward, the Institute will shift its focus to human research in order to answer critical questions about human brain disorders and diseases. It will seek opportunities to collaborate with scientists on research programs, offering its state-of-the-art equipment, technological capacity and a 32,000-square foot facility.

With the view of becoming a self-sustaining entity, the Institute will be pursuing grants and partnerships with funding agencies and foundations to advance neurological health issues.

Beyond its groundbreaking scientific potential, the Atlas was completed under a unique new research paradigm. The team working on the project included neuroscientists, mathematicians and technical experts recruited from imminent organizations nationwide.

Through its unique structure and Allen’s contribution, the team was able to focus exclusively on the Atlas, completing the project on time and under budget and achieving scientific and technological milestones that many research institutions could not.

The genesis of the Allen Brain Atlas dates back to 2002, when Paul Allen gathered together leading scientists from around the world and posed a critical question: “What is the one thing that will make the biggest difference in the field of brain science?”

Arthur W. Toga, a professor of neurology at the UCLA School of Medicine and a member of the Institute’s scientific advisory board, said the Atlas is a critical tool in helping to address questions about the brain that have confounded scientists, philosophers and others for centuries.

“This is a remarkable achievement,” he said. “This is the next step in a tremendous progression in trying to understand the brain and how it functions.”

“As a scientist, how can you ever find something that’s more interesting than the organ in our body which makes us who we are?” Toga said. “It’s the organ that allows us to create opera and great pieces of art and send a shuttle rocket to the moon. It all came from there.”

About the Allen Institute for Brain Science

Located in Seattle, Washington, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Allen Institute for Brain Science, www.alleninstitute.org , was founded in 2001 by philanthropists Paul G. Allen and Jody Patton to identify and address key issues in neuroscience, particularly those that can advance the understanding of human behavior. The Institute anticipates that federal and state funds, along with private contributions, will provide the foundation of an ongoing public-private partnership that will facilitate further brain research. The Institute’s first project, the unprecedented Allen Brain Atlas, is available online at www.brain-map.org .

(Pasted Text from http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060926/sftu010.html)

Date: Tuesday, September 26th
Time: 5:10pm
Where: Classroom 1

All are invited to attend!

The SIGN exec has contacted the appropriate personnel, and hopefully we’re all set to have a general SIGN meeting on Tuesday after school, around 5:00 or so. We’ll be putting up posters to let you know the time and location as well as sending out an email on that day.

Additionally, the cafeteria has allowed us to host a bake sale on Thursday of this week, and we’ll finalize the details at the meeting. The SGA has also asked that we participate in some of their events, and our options are:

Dr. Auction Sept 29

Oct. 20 Casino Night

Nov. 18 Blood Drive

Please also think about the mini-conference that we’re hoping of organizing. With luck, it’ll feature some small lectures in addition to hors d’oeuvers and wine.

Additionally, I would like to proudly present the location of our new club website, thanks to no other than the illustrious Simon Wong and the SIGN exec. It’s still in the construction phase, but we’ll be working to make it a hotspot for information, as well as easy to use.

http://signsaba.wordpress.com/

Thanks again,

SIGN exec

It’s another new semester and here’s a heads up on some of the plans we hope to put into action.

First of all, the exec have been working on a website that will give newcomers an idea of what we’re about and hopefully feature a Saba student – doctor/resident forum that will provide information for students about case scenarios and the two years following Saba. With luck, you’ll be able to talk with physicians in or passing through major centers.

Additionally, we’re hoping to schedule an information session with Dr. Keller concerning the possibilities in Neuroscience and Neurology, as well as create a small conference later in the semester here on the island where students in every semester can meet with some or all of the professors (hopefully our largest and most successful event). Of course, we are waiting for a general SIGN club meeting to iron out the final details (this is where you guys have your say and volunteer!).

However, before we have our first meeting (which should be in about a week and a half – food and refreshments provided), we’re hoping to have a bake sale to raise some money. So once that’s been passed by the appropriate
authorities, some of the exec will be asking you to help out in this effort, which hopefully will occur next Wednesday, September 20th.

Last but certainly not least, we’ll more than likely be helping out with other SGA activities and hopefully have some liasons with other clubs before we take our Christmas break.

Ok! That’s it for now, and we’ll keep you posted.

The SIGN Exec.