Working project:

• Physiologic tremor: non-invsive method to analyse the central oscillators
  

Grant manager:

Ph.D. Student Monica Claudia Dobrea

This research is supported with the help of:

Romanian National Council for Research in High Education grant, Contract: theme 79, code CNCSIS 145, year 2005

Short Descriptions of the Project

   Often tremor, perhaps because of its pathological manifestations, is considered a source of unwanted noise in the system, something to be damped out or controlled. But recently, its inspection was proposed as a more accessible way to beter assess and understand the organisation and activity of the human neuromotor system, beeing particularly suited to the central oscillations analysis (especially in human investigations, where the direct central recording has its obvious limitations).

  In this work, by using photic driving - a cortical activation method -, and some signal processing methods, such as spectral analysis, nonlinear analysis and classification analysis, we want to point out: how much the tremor signal is reflecting the synchronised cortical activity induced for different frequencies, the specific way this synchronised activity is transmitted to hand (through direct, fast pathways or by indirect pathways, involving inter-, intra- and/or subcortical interactions), the activation/response way of the two putative central oscillators independently controlling the right and left hands and their synchronisation, and last, but not least, the finding of some prefered coupling direction between these oscillators (as possible corresponding to the dominant hand).

  Even if we already have a tremor acquisition system that was used in our previously studies, we want, in order to get comparable results with those reported in the literature, to develop a new accelerometers based acquistion system. Moreover, the original sofware will be improved. This means that the entire process will be automated, including the command of the external stimuli together with all the necessary timings for a correct signal acquisition, synchronized with the moment of stimuli presentation.