inside - the School of Engineering - The Catholic University of America

Hidler Honored with
Inaugural Provost
Award for Research
Citing the need
to “recognize the
accomplishments of
the university’s faculty,
to show appreciation
to them and to give
them some reward for
doing a fantastic job,”
Provost John Convey presented seven
CUA faculty members with newly created
Provost Awards at the May 4 faculty
luncheon. Joseph Hidler, Ph.D., associate
professor of biomedical engineering,
received a Provost’s Award for Excellence
in Research and Scholarship. Two additional
School of Engineering faculty — Lu Sun,
Ph.D., associate professor of civil engineering,
nominated for excellence in research,
and John Judge, Ph.D., assistant professor
of mechanical engineering, for excellence
in teaching — were among the 31 nominees.
“All the nominees were very worthy
and in most cases it was hard to choose
the winners,” said Convey.
Hidler’s research interests include the
study of neuromuscular pathologies associated
with stroke and spinal cord injury,
and the development of robotic devices
designed to facilitate motor recovery. He
received the School of Engineering’s 2003
Charles H. Kaman Award for Excellence
in Teaching, 2005 Charles H. Kaman
Award for Excellence in Research, and
the American Spinal Injury Association’s
“best presentation” at its 2004 annual
meeting. He serves on the Scientific
Advisory Board for the Paralyzed Veterans
Association and is an associate editor of
the journal Transactions on Neural Systems
and Rehabilitation Engineering. During
2005, Hidler published four articles; four
additional articles are in progress. His work
has attracted more than $4.5 million in
support from the Whitaker Foundation, U.S.
Army, National Institutes of Health and
Department of Education’s National Institute
on Disability and Rehabilitation Research.
He works in association with colleagues
at the National Rehabilitation Hospital.
Imaging the Human Brain:
New Insights into Stroke Recovery
Joseph Hidler, Ph.D., associate
professor in the Department
of Biomedical Engineering and
director of The Center for Applied
Biomechanics and Rehabilitation
Research (CABRR) at the National
Rehabilitation Hospital, has
teamed up with the National
Institutes of Health to better
understand how the brain
changes following stroke and how
new interventions
may enhance recovery. Hidler
has spearheaded the effort by
developing Magnetic Resonance
Imaging (MRI) compatible testing
devices that allow researchers to accurately
study brain activity in humans during well-controlled
behavioral tasks.
Until now, one of the major limitations with
functional MRI (fMRI) has been the lack of good
quantitative measurement tools that can be used
inside a magnetic field. Subjects are often asked
to tap their fingers or perhaps pinch a small
force sensor while their brain activity is being
monitored. The problem is that these tasks are
either not well controlled for or cannot be performed
by individuals with major functional
impairments, particularly after stroke. As a
result, correlations between these motor tasks
(e.g. moving a finger) and the area of the brain
that is responsible for the movement are often
inaccurate. Hidler decided to build custom
devices that overcome these limitations. “The
main motivation for developing these devices
was to better understand what happens in the
brain in stroke survivors following intensive therapy.
Throughout the course of an intervention,
we constantly measure an individual’s function —
walking ability, strength, endurance and more.
But we still don’t know how changes in the brain
are responsible for these improvements” he
says. “Unfortunately when we decided to add a
neuroimaging component to one of our studies
in hopes of answering this question, we found
that there were inadequate test devices currently
available.”
To address this issue, Hidler developed upper
and lower extremity test devices that allow
researchers to study brain activity during fMRI
testing in a well-controlled manner. The arm
device allows for accurate measures of forces
generated by subjects at their wrist while the
lower extremity device allows for the measurement
of forces at the ankle, knee and hip joints.
“This was definitely a challenging project since
the magnetic fields we are working in are very
strong — up to 3 Tesla or 30,000 gauss.” A
refrigerator magnet is about 5-10 gauss!
“Essentially this means that all magnetic materials
have to be replaced; otherwise the object will
become a projectile or will heat up. Needless to
say we had to be extremely cautious throughout
the development of the devices.”
Now, researchers can run fMRI tests in
patients with very little function, such as in the
very acute stages of stroke, with high precision.
One of the first studies to be done with the new
devices is to compare brain activity before and
after eight weeks of gait training. Funded by the
National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation
Research, this NRH-led multi-center study is
comparing the effectiveness of robotic gait training
with conventional gait training. Adding the
imaging component will provide insight into how
the brain re-organizes to enhance function. “We
are finding that in some subjects, their walking
ability improves substantially, while in others we
notice only small gains. By looking at how brain
activity changes before and after training, we
may get a better idea of why this is the case. If
we can better understand the process of neural
plasticity and neural recovery, in the future we
may be able to develop more effective interventions.”
The devices are generating a buzz around the
imaging community. The arm device has already
been replicated for Georgetown University’s
Center for Functional and Molecular Imaging and
the leg module has been built for UCLA’s
Department of Neurology.
See http://cabrr.cua.edu for more information
on Hidler’s research.
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