Tasha Bruner : Dr. Lucas : 03/03/2022
Over these past weeks, I have been able to meet with Dr. Lucas virtually and in-person. In our first meeting, we had proper introductions, and we discussed some of the aims of the class and what skills and development I was hoping to get out of the preceptorship. We also reviewed some of the ways I could get involved with his research. In the next meeting, we decided on a project that I can help with to further his research aims and expose me to human projects that meld engineering with medicine. The overarching project goal is to focus on building a set up and experiment for examining electrocorticography of human patients that have intracranial electrodes implanted for seizure monitoring. We went over the specific aims for the current project and reviewed the project in more detail. This project aims to help better understand the conscious and unconscious states of the human brain by recording brain state changes while patients undergo different scenarios throughout the day. I will be establishing experimental apparatus and tasks that focus on human ECoG during transitions of consciousness for these patients with intracranial electrodes. I will also be in contact with a medical student at Perelman School of Medicine to discuss this project, a contact of Dr. Lucas!
Tanisha and I were able to meet with Dr. Lucas for an informal coffee and donuts session to discuss any topics we had questions on. We talked about our backgrounds and how we got to where we are today, along with what areas of interest Tanisha and I have for our futures, including research and job interests. Dr. Lucas gave us a background on his experiences of getting his MD and PhD, as well as pros and cons of working in industry versus an academic university hospital. He discussed the division of where his time is spent during the week, including surgery and seeing patients, conferences, and working with his company and doing research. We also spent quite some time discussing gene therapy, primarily three main areas of growing interest for gene therapy: CRISPR-Cas9, CAR T-cell therapy, and nanoparticles to reach all areas of the body (like crossing the BBB). We talked about these ideas of discovery and the process from idea to market, along with some of the difficulties with intellectual property and the valley of death for many drugs and devices. We are hoping to get permission to go to the OR and watch a procedure soon as well!
3/04/2022
I have met virtually with the medical student, and we have been able to talk about some of the main ideas of the consciousness project. We talked briefly about the patients used for data acquisition on this project. These individuals are usually epileptic patients with intracranial electrodes (iEEG) to monitor their brainwaves and determine the seizure onset zone within the brain. With these electrodes already placed inside the skull, researchers are using this to work on different areas of research to help further our understanding of the brain. This project is looking at sensory responsiveness of these patients, while analyzing their brain waves to determine when someone is conscious versus unconscious. We talked briefly about the hardware that goes into collecting these iEEGs from the patients within the OR, which is then uploaded through MATLAB for data analysis. There is raw data being collected for a baseline, and then there is additional data being retrieved through a “task” that the patients go through of listening to an auditory sense through headphones and pushing a button when they hear the stimuli. There are other scenarios in which data is being collected as well. After data acquisition, there is signal processing to find the modulus of the eigenvalues to look at brain criticality, a hypothesis about the stable and unstable states of the brain.