Sharif Digital Repository

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive debilitating neurological disorder that causes motor and cognitive impairment. Administration of dopaminergic medication (Levodopa) has been reported to be effective in attenuating the excessive pathological synchronization in basal ganglia. However, long term levodopa therapy has its pitfalls. High frequency deep brain stimulation (DBS) has been suggested as an effective alternative for reducing motor symptoms in PD. In this method, distinct brain regions involved in the pathophysiology of the disease are stimulated electrically at high frequencies (i.e. at 130 Hz). While several studies have been carried out on the effects of DBS and its clinical... 

The brain is constantly placed in stochastic environments. This leads to the brain developing a probabilistic model for the environment. However, sometimes unexpected events occur that lead to surprise and a need for updating the probabilistic model. It can be concluded from this argument that reduction in brian’s surprise is a sign of learning. On the other hand, a probability distribution obtained from a probabilistic model contains an amount of uncertainty. Reducing this uncertainty can also be considered a sign of learning. Surprise and uncertainty can be obtained from a probability distribution using information theory concepts. Another important issue in learning is habituation, which... 

Parkinson's disease is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system. The motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease result from the death of dopamine-generating cells in the substantia nigra. The cause of this cell death is unknown. Early in the course of the disease, the most obvious symptoms are movement-related. Some of the symptoms are: shaking, rigidity, slowness of movement and difficulty with walking and gait. Modern treatments are effective at managing the early motor symptoms of the disease, mainly through the use of levodopa and dopamine agonists. As the disease progresses these drugs eventually become ineffective and produce a complication called dyskinesia, marked by... 

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in posturography methods as an objective quantitative tool for assessing balance and indicating patient with high risk of fall. Although many posturographic studies tried to describe balance deficiencies in PD, little success has been achieved in utilizing static posturography as a tool for discriminating faller and non-faller PD patients. Furthermore, Dynamic posturography studies have delivered valuable insight into the potentiality of these methods for assessing balance, but these devices are very high in price and cumbersome to move that can limit the feasibility of their use in the clinical settings. The aims of this study were: 1)... 

The purpose of this study is to assess the inhibitory effects of an appropriate nanoparticles loaded with gallic acid on the fibrillation of alpha-synuclein. Alpha-synuclein is a major component of protein plaques in synucleinopathies, particularly Parkinson’s disease. Gallic acid (GA, 3,4,5-trihydroxy benzoic acid) is a well–known small molecule which can inhibit the formation of α-synuclein fibrils. For the process of fibrillation, purified protein was incubated at 37◦C and pH 7.2. Fibrillation was analyzed by the standard fibril methods.after that investigated fabricating of gallic acid trapped in the chitosan nanoparticles and gallic acid loaded in chitosan –coated mesoporous silica... 

Metabonomics is a quantitative measurement of time dependent metabolic interactions for living systems in response to the pathological or genetic variations. NMR spectroscopy has emerged as a key tool for understanding metabolic processes in living systems. In this project, the study of metabolomics was performed as classification and regression on samples of parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis disease, celiac disease and crohn’s disease. In classification part, various methods were applied using optimal parameters.classification methods in Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis disease, celiac disease and crohn’s disease were RF, CART, PLS-DA, RF and RF respectively. Based on the... 

Levodopa [L-3, 4-dihydroxyphenylalanine, or L-DOPA] is an important neurotransmitter used for the treatment of neural disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. Abnormal L-Dopa concentrations in biological fluids can be used for evaluation of diseases such as Parkinson’s diseases. In the first part of this thesis, a rapid and sensitive method for levodopa detection was reported which is based on in situ formation of polylevodopa nanoparticles. The assay is very simple and low cost and uses only NaOH and HCl as reagents. Under alkaline conditions, levodopa is spontaneously oxidized to its quinone derivative and shows the fluorescence properties. The fluorescence signal of the oxidation product of... 

Parkinson's disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disease in which balance disorders are a common symptom. Clinical and non-clinical methods have been developed to evaluate the quality of maintaining balance. Clinical methods include questionnaires and tests that are scored by the therapist and therefore depend on the examiner's skill. On the other hand, there are biomechanical methods that do not depend on the therapist's skill. Posturography -based methods are among the biomechanical tests used today to assess balance. In these methods, some indicators are extracted from the patient's foot center of pressure that can measure the quality of balance. These studies usually examine the... 

Parkinson's disease impairs the patients' balance with the degeneration of the neurons related to their postural control. There are many rehabilitation methods to preclude the disease or weaken its effects. To assess the influence of these methods and their outcome, there are two main evaluation methods, including clinical (qualitative and dependent on the presence of a therapist) and quantitative, such as posturography. Using control models is one of the quantitative methods researchers have been used for more than three decades. Considering this and what have been done in the literature, the purpose of this research is to develop a balance assessment method in dynamic tasks, such as the... 

Recent studies of brain activities indicate that Phase-Amplitude Coupling (PAC) between several regions of the brain, are meaningfully related to Parkinson’s Disease. In this research, we have studied PAC as a statistical measure in Parkinsonian patients’ brains while Deep Brain Stimulation treatment with different stimulation frequencies are being applied. In order to do so, we have investigated patients’ brain signals, and estimated PAC between regions of interest; afterwards, by using the estimated PAC values, we have found significant effects of the treatments on parkinsonian brains; furthermore, two treatments that are using 130 Hz and 340 Hz stimuli signals are compared. In this... 

The brain is one of the most critical parts of the body with a lot of complexity. The treatment of brain diseases has always been in an aura of uncertainty due to its high sensitivity. In the meantime, Parkinson's disease has become the second most frequent brain disease after Alzheimer's, involving more than two percent of the population over 65 years of age. One of the biggest questions in this field is how the Parkinson's process is formed. This question has already received much attention from the pathophysiological point of view but has not been answered from the functional and structural brain network's point of view. This research compares healthy macaque monkeys' functional and... 

The human brain needs to create a model of data surrounding it continuously. To do so, handling the dynamics of information through communication between the brain regions is a critical step. Having a model of this procedure in the brain not only provides a clear explanation of how cognition occurs in the brain, but also enables us to have a better view of the cognition impairments in the brain. Surprise is a process in the brain that brings various cognitive abilities, including attention and memory, into practical use. Furthermore, these abilities are about manipulating the input information in an optimized way. Memory is the ability to store information arriving at a specific time.... 

Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects motor functions. Performing mobility exercises help patients slowing down the progression of the illness and improving symptoms of the disease. Assessment and evaluation of activities of mobility exercises are critical for any treatment program particularly in tele-rehabilitation system. The purpose of the current study is to design an affordable and accurate wearable device with inertial measurement units (IMUs) for mobility activity recognition in Parkinson’s patients. The optimum number and arrangement (i.e. configuration) were found to minimize the cost while maintaining a fair accuracy. The activity recognition was... 

Parkinson's disease is the most common progressive neurological disorder after Alzheimer, which is associated with motor disabilities. One of the most effective ways to improve patient’s condition with this disease, is rehabilitation.Assessment of the patient during rehabilitation is very important in order to give a better understanding of patient's status to the specialist, but qualitative assessment methods in traditional rehabilitation are ineffective in fast and accurate evaluation of the patient's condition; and because of their need for patient’s attendance in clinic, they will incur huge medical costs. Therefore, the purpose of the present study is to present a quantitative method to... 

Parkinson's disease, after Alzheimer's, is the most important and common progressive neurodegenerative disorders. There are various methods for assessing the quality of patients’ movements. One of them is biomechanical methods. The application of these methods in telerehabilitation has been considered by many researchers. Telerehabilitation improves the efficiency of the therapists and reduces problems such as commute costs, traffic stress, and patient fatigue.In the present study, 21 Parkinson patients were treated and evaluated remotely using SANA system. This study aimed to investigate the effects of the therapist absence during the tele-assessment and its impact on the validity and... 

Parkinson’s disease is considered as a progressive neurodegenerative disease that hasn’t any certain treatment. In Iran until 1390, there were about 150 thousand patient struggling with this disease. Rehabilitation is known as an effective treatment to decrease destructive progress of the disease. Because of motional problems of PD patients, it is hard to come to the clinics. So developing remote rehabilitation would be interested by researchers and occupational therapists. Therefore in the recent years, an activity recognition system has been developed in Mowafaghian research center. This system is based on IMU sensors and a NM classifier.These systems are challenging with some problems,... 

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder and during the last few years considerable measures have been taken to rehabilitate its patients. To prevent the disorder from deteriorating and to control its progress, patients have to undergo some therapy sessions that incorporate some mobility exercises e.g. walking, sitting up and down, and etc. Since transporting the patients to the clinical centers is too burdensome, growing attention is drawn towards telerehabilitation. To this end, DMRCINT has developed a telerehab system for PD patients. This system is an intelligent classifier that uses features of linear acceleration and angular velocity signals to detect the activity that... 

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) has had tremendous improvements in the field of elderly monitoring and telerehabilitation. An anchor point for HAR systems in telerehabilitation is supervising rehabilitative excercises. For Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients, a group of rehabilitative activities, known as Lee Silverman Voice Treatment-BIG, or LSVT-BIG, have shown to be effective in improving motor performance. Similar to any rehabilitative measure, delivering these activities requires the supervision of an expert or clinician, so that the patient receives proper feedbacks. HAR systems can replace human experts. They can recognize activities and provide the user with proper feedback. HAR... 

Researchers working at Mowafaghian Rehabilitation Research Center have decided to develop a telerehabilitation system named SEPANTA, especially designed for activity recognition of Parkinson's Disease patients. In this regard, the system uses 34 mobility exercises, including 20 LSVT-BIG activities (especially designed for PD patients) and 14 functional daily activities. Human Activity Recognition (HAR) systems faces various challenges e.g., intra-class variabilities, meaning differences in an activity performance by different persons or a person. Data augmentation and utilizing deep learning models are the most common solutions for the risen challenges. However, deep structures require an...