Theses and dissertations

This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students. 

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Investigating the efficacy of novel TrkB agonists to augment stroke recovery

Description
Stroke remains the leading cause of adult disability in developed countries. Most survivors live with residual motor impairments that severely diminish independence and quality of life. After stroke, the only accepted treatment for these patients is motor rehabilitation. However, the amount and kind of rehabilitation required to induce clinically significant…

Stroke remains the leading cause of adult disability in developed countries. Most survivors live with residual motor impairments that severely diminish independence and quality of life. After stroke, the only accepted treatment for these patients is motor rehabilitation. However, the amount and kind of rehabilitation required to induce clinically significant improvements in motor function is rarely given due to the constraints of our current health care system. Research reported in this dissertation contributes towards developing adjuvant therapies that may augment the impact of motor rehabilitation and improve functional outcome. These studies have demonstrated reorganization of maps within motor cortex as a function of experience in both healthy and brain-injured animals by using intracortical microstimulation technique. Furthermore, synaptic plasticity has been identified as a key neural mechanism in directing motor map plasticity, evidenced by restoration of movement representations within the spared cortical tissue accompanied by increase in synapse number translating into motor improvement after stroke. There is increasing evidence that brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) modulates synaptic and morphological plasticity in the developing and mature nervous system. Unfortunately, BDNF itself is a poor candidate because of its short half-life, low penetration through the blood brain barrier, and activating multiple receptor units, p75 and TrkB on the neuronal membrane. In order to circumvent this problem efficacy of two recently developed novel TrkB agonists, LM22A-4 and 7,8-dihydroxyflavone, that actively penetrate the blood brain barrier and enhance functional recovery. Findings from these dissertation studies indicate that administration of these pharmacological compounds, accompanied by motor rehabilitation provide a powerful therapeutic tool for stroke recovery.
ContributorsWarraich, Zuha (Author) / Kleim, Jeffrey A (Thesis advisor) / Stabenfeldt, Sarah (Committee member) / Tillery, Stephen-Helms (Committee member) / Santello, Marco (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013

Applied interdisciplinary concepts for designing visual media within interactive neurorehabilitation systems

Description
As the application of interactive media systems expands to address broader problems in health, education and creative practice, they fall within a higher dimensional space for which it is inherently more complex to design. In response to this need an emerging area of interactive system design, referred to as experiential…

As the application of interactive media systems expands to address broader problems in health, education and creative practice, they fall within a higher dimensional space for which it is inherently more complex to design. In response to this need an emerging area of interactive system design, referred to as experiential media systems, applies hybrid knowledge synthesized across multiple disciplines to address challenges relevant to daily experience. Interactive neurorehabilitation (INR) aims to enhance functional movement therapy by integrating detailed motion capture with interactive feedback in a manner that facilitates engagement and sensorimotor learning for those who have suffered neurologic injury. While INR shows great promise to advance the current state of therapies, a cohesive media design methodology for INR is missing due to the present lack of substantial evidence within the field. Using an experiential media based approach to draw knowledge from external disciplines, this dissertation proposes a compositional framework for authoring visual media for INR systems across contexts and applications within upper extremity stroke rehabilitation. The compositional framework is applied across systems for supervised training, unsupervised training, and assisted reflection, which reflect the collective work of the Adaptive Mixed Reality Rehabilitation (AMRR) Team at Arizona State University, of which the author is a member. Formal structures and a methodology for applying them are described in detail for the visual media environments designed by the author. Data collected from studies conducted by the AMRR team to evaluate these systems in both supervised and unsupervised training contexts is also discussed in terms of the extent to which the application of the compositional framework is supported and which aspects require further investigation. The potential broader implications of the proposed compositional framework and methodology are the dissemination of interdisciplinary information to accelerate the informed development of INR applications and to demonstrate the potential benefit of generalizing integrative approaches, merging arts and science based knowledge, for other complex problems related to embodied learning.
ContributorsLehrer, Nicole (Author) / Rikakis, Thanassis (Committee member) / Olson, Loren (Committee member) / Wolf, Steven L. (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014