Stephen Piatkowski, Taylor Given, Dr. Merola, 2/15
Today (2/15), we both went to meet Dr. Merola for the first time. We talked for several minutes, and he had his assistant, Gurleen, show us around for a few minutes. Afterward, he invited us to a lecture he was giving about Parkinson’s disease before we departed for the day.
Since today was just a quick introduction, we didn’t really have the chance to go into the clinic or anything like that. Personally, the most intriguing thing from today’s experience was about a project that Gurleen is working on. One of their patients isn’t experiencing a beneficial change in their symptoms post-Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS), so they were referred to OSU, because their original doctors didn’t know what to do. However, because the clinic they originally got their MRI taken at is out of business and the images of the MRI aren’t able to be accessed, they have to use MRI’s from other patients to attempt to build an accurate model of what this patient’s STN with the leads looked like. They have the coordinates that the leads were in, and they are trying to use that, plus other MRI’s to try to build an accurate model to determine what the best course of action for the second round of DBS would be. This project is being conducted completely on Matlab.
Since this project is being conducted on Matlab, and that is the coding language we best know, perhaps we could lend some expertise on best finding an efficient way to find the best model could have some benefit.
Something else that we found surprising was during the lecture about Parkinson’s. Out of all the phase three clinical trials that have been conducted on potential therapies (drugs) on ‘curing’ Parkinson’s, none of them have passed. There really is no great way to ‘cure’ Parkinson’s currently, due to the amount of genes that play a role in the disease, among other things.