Hello Everyone! We are officially more than half way through the Howard Hughes Research Fellowship. Time if flying by and results are starting to add up in the lab. I will have a finished poster soon enough; however, this past week each HHRF participant had the opportunity to present his/her research to the rest of us. This week’s blog assignment was to write about someone else’s chalk talk that we found interesting.
One of the chalk talks I found particularly interesting was Matt’s talk on Deep Brain Stimulation. First and foremost, the idea of being able to relieve chronic back pain with external electrical stimulus is quite intriguing. However, my interest in his project was the capacity to then measure the effects of this “treatment.” I thought it was pretty interesting to be able to take qualitative data (e.g. pain maps) and transform them into significant quantitative data that could potentially shed light on the efficacy of the research. Certainly, there is much room to grow as currently the only variable being documented is the locus of pain. It would be ideal to also measure degree of pain, yet it is understandable that this variable would be difficult to measure since the investigator is dependent upon the subjective pain threshold of each patient.
