A researcher and a graduate student with the department of electrical and computer engineering at the UH Cullen College of Engineering both won best poster awards at the 2013 Mission Connect Annual Scientific Symposium held in Houston in December 2013.
ECE researcher Atilla Kilicarslan received the overall best spinal cord injury poster award for his project titled “Neurorex – A Thought Controlled Robotic Exoskeleton for Gait Restoration.” Kilicarslan delivered a three-minute elevator pitch for his poster to a panel of judges, who chose his poster presentation as the best among the 15 other presentations.
Kilicarslan works closely with ECE professor Jose Luis Contreras-Vidal, a leading expert on brain-machine interface systems. Contreras-Vidal and his research team (of which Kilicarslan is a member) focus on the development of noninvasive methods to interface the human brain with machines in order to help patients with mobility issues – such as paraplegics, stroke patients or amputees – regain their ability to walk and utilize their limbs using only the power of their thoughts.
ECE graduate student Kedar Grama received 1st place in the traumatic brain injury student category for his poster titled “Comprehensive detection and quantitative profiling of brain cytoarchitectural alterations caused by pathophysiological conditions using multiplex imaging and computational analysis.”
Grama’s research focuses on the widespread brain alterations that can take place after a traumatic brain injury occurs – even in portions of the brain quite distant from the original injury or damage site. Current imaging methods often miss critical changes in certain brain regions that can eventually manifest into additional clinical conditions down the road. Using a machine-learning algorithm to analyze images of rat brains, Grama was able to produce a much richer set of quantitative measurements to detect changes in cell structure throughout the brain, as well as identify the type and state of each cell.
Mission Connect was founded by the TIRR Foundation in 1997 with the purpose of establishing a collaborative neurotrauma research project focused on halting the progression of damage and restoring lost function in patients who have sustained a spinal cord injury, brain injury or stroke.