STROKEBUSTERS
Rethinking Rehabilitation
About Us
Objectives
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To develop a complete and fully automated Virtual Environment for Stroke rehabilitation.
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To build a test bench that can be used to come up with a customised and patient-specified rehab strategy.
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To understand Stroke at the neuronal level by drawing parallels to a simple neural network architecture and try to answer the age-old contradictions prevalent in Stroke literature.
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To extend the same principles to various motor impairments and understand them in a more fundamental manner by comparing them to neural networks.
Major Definite Purpose
The Major Definite Purpose of our team is to serve as a one-stop solution and destination for stroke rehabilitation. While we are known as StrokeBusters, our aim is to slowly expand and someday serve to rehabilitate the majority of motor impairments. Our goal is to develop a principle of rehabilitation solidly built on neuroscience and hence, not restricted to Stroke but is versatile enough to be expanded to any motor impairment.
We are a bunch of young, hungry and mostly sleep-deprived researchers who belong to the Laboratory for Computational Neuroscience situated at IIT, Madras.
Our goal is to identify and develop optimal strategies to combat stroke. We primarily look at the stroke of the Motor Cortex and are interested in what to do after a stroke has occurred in order to overcome the disabilities caused by it.
At our lab, we aim at understanding neuroscience using a principles first approach. We hope to bring the same to the field of stroke rehabilitation and understand the problem from the fundamentals and design novel techniques rooted in neuroscience.
Meet the Team
Sundari Elango
B.E Electrical & Electronics Engineering
Sundari is a PhD student in the CNS Lab. She is currently working on implementing the different rehabilitation strategies used by physicians. The aim of her work is to identify the components in the brain that are involved in the imagination of movements (motor imagery) and movement planning as well as understanding the computations performed by them in order to translate them to the model. Her research interests broadly lie in the area of Cognitive Neuroscience and her hobbies include reading books and writing.
Team Leader
Shabeera Hafsa
M.E. Virtual Prototyping and Digital Manufacturing
Shabeera is a Unity developer and works as a project associate at the computational neuroscience laboratory. She is involved in research that combines computational modeling, movement behavior, and gaming to treat strokes of the upper limbs. Her expertise is in the development of 2D/3D games, virtual reality experiences, and augmented reality experiences. Her research interests include the use of AR, VR, and game-based learning for teaching and training. Her hobbies include painting, crafting, reading, and traveling.
Project Associate
Current Projects & Job Openings
Virtual Environment for Stroke Rehabilitation
(VER)
About - Virtuality Reality has shown a lot of promise in recent times as a rehabilitative tool for Stroke patients. Performing repetitive movements as expected in a conventional rehab session could make the patient lose patience very easily. Presenting the rehab session in the form of fun games can help the patient stay motivated for long and even make them eagerly await their next session.
Expertise Required - As part of this project, you will be expected to design and animate games using Blender, Unity etc. A good knowledge of these platform is expected.
Positions available - 1 (6 months with potential for extension; salary - Rs. 22,000-Rs. 25,000)
automated motor assessment (AMA)
About - Upon the incidence of a stroke, the level of functionality still left in a patient is to be evaluated before a rehab strategy can be prescribed for them. Several scales are used for as part of Motor Assessment and patients are scored on the basis of their performance in these assessments. These scales can also be used to track the improvement in the performance of the patient through the rehabilitation phase.
Expertise Required - This project requires skill in coding and familiarity with python and deep learning techniques. Also looking for people with expertise in Android UI creation, libraries similar to Retrofit/Google Firebase, JSON parsing
Positions available - 1 (6 months with potential for extension; salary - Rs. 22,000-Rs. 25,000)
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Neural Network Approach to Stroke (NNaS)
About - Although using physiotherapy to overcome the functional deficits caused by stroke has been in use for long, there still remains deep and fundamental questions that need to be answered about stroke and motor control in general. The inherent contradictions prevalent in the most popular rehab techniques - bimanual and CIMT - also require answers. This project aims to answer some of these
Expertise Required - This project requires skill in coding and familiarity with python and statistics
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Publications
Journal
Narayanamurthy, R., Jayakumar, S., Elango, S. et al. A Cortico- Basal Ganglia Model for choosing an optimal rehabilitation strategy in Hemiparetic Stroke. Sci Rep 9, 13472 (2019) doi:10.1038/s41598-019-49670-4
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Elango, Sundari, Amal Jude Ashwin Francis, and V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy. "Interaction of network and rehabilitation therapy parameters in defining recovery after stroke in a Bilateral Neural Network." Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation 19, no. 1 (2022): 1-21. doi: 10.1186/s12984-022-01106-3
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Book Chapter
Vignesh Muralidharan, Alekhya Mandali, Pragathi Priyadharsini Balasubramani, Hima Mehta, V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy, and Marjan Jahanshahi. "A Cortico-Basal Ganglia Model to Understand the Neural Dynamics of Targeted Reaching in Normal and Parkinson’s Conditions." In Computational Neuroscience Models of the Basal Ganglia, pp. 167-195. Springer, Singapore, 2018.
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Conference
Rukhmani Narayanamurthy, Samyukta Jayakumar, Rahul Gupta, Vignesh Muralidharan, Midhun P. Unni, Aniruddha Sinha, and V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy. ‘A Cortico – Basal Ganglia Model for Bimanual Reaching in Hemiparetic Stroke’, 12 September 2017. https://doi.org/10.12751/nncn.bc2017.0155.[Link - pg 182]
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A cortico-basal ganglia model for choosing an optimal rehabilitation strategy for hemiparetic stroke.*S. Elango1, S. V. Chakravarthy1, S. Jayakumar1, R. Narayanamurthy1, V. Muralidharan2; 1Dept. of Biotech., Indian Inst. of Technol. Madras, Chennai, India; 2Dept. of Psychology, Univ. of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA in Annual Conference of SfN 2019 (Accepted on June 24th, 2019).
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