Overview
Topic status: We're looking for students to study this topic.
We have collaborated with neurology clinical and research specialists at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital, Erasmus Medical Centre Rotterdam and, more recently, at the Miami Center to Cure Paralysis in order to develop better methods for identifying and counting the number of functioning motor units serving a particular muscle, motor unit number estimation (MUNE). The method uses electromyography to stimulate a nerve to a muscle and record the response in the form of a stimulus response curve. At RBWH motor neuron disease patients provide data from longitudinal studies to investigate the loss of motor units while studies in Miami investigate the growth of motor units in laboratory rats treated with embryonic cells. The project will review the literature on the topic and investigate using Bayesian statistics to measure how the number of motor units changes in humans and animals. Data from the serial studies are available and this allows the models for possible neuron loss over time to be fitted and compared.- Study level
- Honours
- Supervisors
- QUT
- Organisational unit
Science and Engineering Faculty
- Research area
- Keywords
- statistics
- Contact
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Please contact the supervisor.
Professor Tony Pettitt
