Modelling Traumatic Brain Injury Using Neuropsychological, Neurosurgical, Neurochemical, And Neuroradiological Measures
Funder
National Health and Medical Research Council
Funding Amount
$403,370.00
Summary
Post mortem and brain imaging studies of patients who have had a traumatic brain injury (TBI) indicate that they sustain both focal damage and widespread diffuse damage. This diffuse damage is more difficult to detect but has been found to occur even after mild injuries and in the absence of focal brain damage. Moreover, diffuse damage is thought to contribute both to changes in a patient's level of consciousness at the time of injury and to the long-term problems experienced by patients after a ....Post mortem and brain imaging studies of patients who have had a traumatic brain injury (TBI) indicate that they sustain both focal damage and widespread diffuse damage. This diffuse damage is more difficult to detect but has been found to occur even after mild injuries and in the absence of focal brain damage. Moreover, diffuse damage is thought to contribute both to changes in a patient's level of consciousness at the time of injury and to the long-term problems experienced by patients after a TBI, suggesting that diffuse damage may provide a valuable index of the amount of brain damage that has been sustained as a result of an injury. While clinicians presently assess many cognitive abilities, they do not target the cognitive problems that are thought to arise from diffuse damage. This is largely due to an absence of validated measures and a limited understanding of the effects of diffuse damage on cognitive functioning. Consequently, we do not have a clear understanding of the extent to which diffuse damage contributes to patient outcome after a TBI. The present study is designed to provide a model of the effects of TBI that will include neuropsychological, neurosurgical, neurochemical and neuroradiological variables. The cognitive effects of diffuse damage will be assessed and related to neurochemical and brain imaging indices of diffuse damage in order to examine the relationship between brain structure and function. This study will improve our understanding of the effects of diffuse damage on cognitive functioning and will lead to the development of measures that can be used to assess the consequences of diffuse damage. In doing so, this study will improve the accuracy with which we are able to diagnose the cognitive problems of patients who have suffered a TBI. This will, in turn, reduce the public health, insurance and litigation costs associated with this type of injury.Read moreRead less
Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment And Facilities - Grant ID: LE0561231
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$671,715.00
Summary
MRI GRID Computing Facility: Design, Optimisation and Image Processing. The MRI Grid Computing Facility provides the IT infrastructure to achieve effective e-research in the area of magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, a field of neuroscience research that revolutionizes the way brain diseases are identified and treated. The facility consists of a dedicated high performance grid compute engine, distributed visualisation workstations, and distributed data warehouse facilities. Software tools acc ....MRI GRID Computing Facility: Design, Optimisation and Image Processing. The MRI Grid Computing Facility provides the IT infrastructure to achieve effective e-research in the area of magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, a field of neuroscience research that revolutionizes the way brain diseases are identified and treated. The facility consists of a dedicated high performance grid compute engine, distributed visualisation workstations, and distributed data warehouse facilities. Software tools accessible through the Internet will enable researchers to archive, retrieve and exchange data and software; access distributed MR image databases and the latest MR image analysis tools; schedule analysis tasks on the grid compute engine, the outcomes of which will be visualized by the visualization workstations.Read moreRead less
eResearch in the Neurosciences: Building collaborations in Asia. The proposed Australasian collaboration on eResearch in Neuroscience will promote and maintain the good health of Australians by 'improving critical mass through collaboration and information sharing' through increased access to advanced imaging technology in Korea and analysis techniques in Japan. The collaboration will also promote frontier technologies for building and transforming Australian industries by developing a creative ....eResearch in the Neurosciences: Building collaborations in Asia. The proposed Australasian collaboration on eResearch in Neuroscience will promote and maintain the good health of Australians by 'improving critical mass through collaboration and information sharing' through increased access to advanced imaging technology in Korea and analysis techniques in Japan. The collaboration will also promote frontier technologies for building and transforming Australian industries by developing a creative and innovative research environment and enhancing Australian scientists' participation in breakthrough science. Great national benefit can be derived from international research collaboration, due to the contribution frontier technology can make to science and health. Read moreRead less
Neurons And Neurotransmitters That Control Phasic Laryngeal Motoneuron Activity
Funder
National Health and Medical Research Council
Funding Amount
$278,736.00
Summary
Opening and closing of the vocal cords with breathing is an automatic function that is present before birth and is essential for life. Opening the vocal cords allows inspired air to enter the lungs and closure serves to protect the lungs from food and drink. Failure of coordination is associated with a range of life-threatening airway disorders, particularly in newborns. Nerves in the brain and the chemicals they release transmit the rhythm of breathing to the nerves that control the vocal cords ....Opening and closing of the vocal cords with breathing is an automatic function that is present before birth and is essential for life. Opening the vocal cords allows inspired air to enter the lungs and closure serves to protect the lungs from food and drink. Failure of coordination is associated with a range of life-threatening airway disorders, particularly in newborns. Nerves in the brain and the chemicals they release transmit the rhythm of breathing to the nerves that control the vocal cords. However, the specific neurons and chemicals involved are not known. This information is crucial in understanding the chemical disorder in the brain responsible for the loss of coordination between breathing and vocal cord activity, and in formulating strategies to treat these conditions using drugs that correct the chemical disorder. By way of example, we have used our animal studies to develop the first ever drug trial to treat children with congenital vocal cord paralysis, whose vocal cords fail to open with inspiration and require a tracheostomy. We have selected a drug that corrects the proposed disorder of brain chemistry responsible for this condition. This approach will serve as a template for the management of a variety of other life-threatening airway disorders in newborns using drugs that act on the brain. We will now carry out further experiments to identify the nerves and their chemicals that control the motoneurons that drive the vocal cords. The key experiment involves recording from inside an individual vocal cord motoneuron in the brain while simultaneously applying a range of chemicals to its external surface. By recording the response of the nerve, we can determine which chemicals control its activity. Using our knowledge of the pattern of chemicals released by respiratory neurons, we will identify neurons for further study, and establish chemical and anatomical relationships between the respiratory nerve and the vocal cord nerve.Read moreRead less
Content-based image retrieval using interactive feedback. Storage and retrieval of visual information plays an important role in multimedia systems. We aim to develop a method to retrieve images and visual information from multimedia databases and multimedia systems. The method will go beyond simple similarity search to retrieval data on knowledge by accommodating knowledge acquisition and sequential learning techniques, and will be able to handle complex queries with partial information. The ....Content-based image retrieval using interactive feedback. Storage and retrieval of visual information plays an important role in multimedia systems. We aim to develop a method to retrieve images and visual information from multimedia databases and multimedia systems. The method will go beyond simple similarity search to retrieval data on knowledge by accommodating knowledge acquisition and sequential learning techniques, and will be able to handle complex queries with partial information. The technology developed will find many applications in the multimedia area such as education, medical imaging, desktop publishing, advertising, business presentation, and engineering design.Read moreRead less
A scheme and a formal language for interactive video. Video has been increasingly used in many fields and plays an important role in our daily life. Most traditional video players and video formats only provide linear interaction, such as play, fast forward, fast backward or jump to a certain frame of a video stream indicated by a sequence or time on a random access device. This project aims at enabling a hyperlink type of interactions for video data through the development of video interaction ....A scheme and a formal language for interactive video. Video has been increasingly used in many fields and plays an important role in our daily life. Most traditional video players and video formats only provide linear interaction, such as play, fast forward, fast backward or jump to a certain frame of a video stream indicated by a sequence or time on a random access device. This project aims at enabling a hyperlink type of interactions for video data through the development of video interaction mark-up language (VIML). It can find many applications in education, marketing, web presentation and digital TV.Read moreRead less
Organisational Motivation as a Predictor of Benefits from the Adoption of Information Technology. IOS are becoming increasingly important for organisations to remain competitive in a global marketplace. By using organisational motivations to better understand how to design and structure the processes for IOS implementation and set more realistic expectation, Australian organisations will be able to develop more effective, evidence-based methods for IOS implementation. The theory being tested is ....Organisational Motivation as a Predictor of Benefits from the Adoption of Information Technology. IOS are becoming increasingly important for organisations to remain competitive in a global marketplace. By using organisational motivations to better understand how to design and structure the processes for IOS implementation and set more realistic expectation, Australian organisations will be able to develop more effective, evidence-based methods for IOS implementation. The theory being tested is an original contribution in a growing area of information technology research. The data and rigorously tested research protocols developed will enhance Australia'a research standing, contribute to university teaching and researcher training, and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the Australian information technology industry. Read moreRead less
Improving Extensible Markup Language (XML) data quality using XML integrity constraints. The first benefit of the project will be the of development a new technology that will improve the data quality in Australian organizations using the rapidly growing Extensible Markup Language (XML) technology. It will also be of benefit to the Australian software industry, since the outcome of the project is a software tool for cleaning XML data that is aimed at eventual commercialisation in a quickly gro ....Improving Extensible Markup Language (XML) data quality using XML integrity constraints. The first benefit of the project will be the of development a new technology that will improve the data quality in Australian organizations using the rapidly growing Extensible Markup Language (XML) technology. It will also be of benefit to the Australian software industry, since the outcome of the project is a software tool for cleaning XML data that is aimed at eventual commercialisation in a quickly growing area of the software market. The project will also boost international research collaboration through the involvement of an overseas partner investigator, and expand Australia's expertise in the new area of XML technology through the training of a Ph.D. student.Read moreRead less
Mobile Query Processing: An Integrated Approach. Mobile communication is a frontier technology, and providing efficient mobile query services to the general public is critical in placing Australia as a leading country in mobile information services. The benefit to Australia nationally is beyond the telecommunication industry. The project will transform other Australian industries which rely on mobile information services, including emergency response services (eg. ambulance, police), mobile work ....Mobile Query Processing: An Integrated Approach. Mobile communication is a frontier technology, and providing efficient mobile query services to the general public is critical in placing Australia as a leading country in mobile information services. The benefit to Australia nationally is beyond the telecommunication industry. The project will transform other Australian industries which rely on mobile information services, including emergency response services (eg. ambulance, police), mobile workforce and mobile commerce, transportation/traffic controller, bureau of meteorology, defence/army forces, financial market, as well as tourism and news. With the enormous growing of investment in these industries, this project will become a major contribution to national productivity and growth.Read moreRead less
Building a Prototype for Quality Information Retrieval from the Internet. This projects aims to consider fundamental issues in implementing a prototype quality information retrieval system from the world wide web. These issues include: retrieval of relevant pages to a given topic using a focussed crawler; text categorisation of the retrieved web pages; quality selection criteria with the formulation of a quality index to determine quality of retrieved pages, and user interface design to obtain r ....Building a Prototype for Quality Information Retrieval from the Internet. This projects aims to consider fundamental issues in implementing a prototype quality information retrieval system from the world wide web. These issues include: retrieval of relevant pages to a given topic using a focussed crawler; text categorisation of the retrieved web pages; quality selection criteria with the formulation of a quality index to determine quality of retrieved pages, and user interface design to obtain relevance feedback. The outcome will be a prototype system useful to business and industry though to guide our thinking we will use issues in constructing a quality digital library collection as a sounding board.
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