Improving speed, accuracy, and quality of acute stroke care
Name:
Dr. Christina Wilson
Email
christina.wilson@neurology.ufl.edu
Phone
(352) 273-5550
Faculty Department/Division
Neurology
This project is primarily:
Clinical
Research Project Description:
“Time is brain” is an important mantra in the treatment of acute ischemic stroke, as each second of an untreated stroke can result in permanent damage to over 32,000 neurons. Comprehensive stroke centers continuously strive to improve their accuracy of stroke identification and shorten treatment times in order to improve outcomes for patients. The UF Stroke Team has multiple ongoing projects to identify and address barriers to stroke care within specific patient populations. For example, one project is to understand factors that contribute to administration of thrombolytics later than desired (ie, greater than 30 minutes after arrival to the hospital), so that interventions can be designed to target these specific patient populations for faster treatment. Other ongoing studies are to understand predictive factors underlying inaccurately-called stroke alerts in the inpatient setting and emergency department, which will then lead to the creation of targeted educational material for assessment in follow-up studies. Medical students will assist with data collection via retrospective chart review, data analysis, and/or creation of stroke education material for healthcare team members and patients. These projects will likely lead to one or more presentations and publications, and best of all – your work will lead to improvements in the quality of stroke patient care!
Example publication: J Neurosci Nurs 2023;55(6):194-198.
Does this project have an international component or travel?
No
Improving family planning in women with epilepsy
Name:
Dr. Katherine Zarroli
Email
katherine.zarroli@jax.ufl.edu
Phone
(302) 561-5456
Faculty Department/Division
Neurology
This project is primarily:
Clinical
Research Project Description:
More than half of pregnancies for women with epilepsy are unplanned, similar to that in the general population. Yet, the risks associated with unplanned pregnancies may be higher in women with epilepsy due to their co-morbid epilepsy. Risk for spontaneous fetal loss in women with epilepsy is higher for unplanned pregnancies compared to planned pregnancies. Pregnancy planning is also independently associated with less adverse fetal outcomes, optimization of anti-seizure medications, better seizure control, and appropriate administration of folic acid.
The purpose of this project is to design an educational intervention for reproductive age women with epilepsy on the topic of family planning. Subjects will complete a survey before and after the educational intervention with the hypothesis that responses will be improved after the intervention.
The role of the medical student will be to assist with educational intervention design (eg video and/or powerpoint creation), subject recruitment, and administration of the survey and intervention.
There is no funding as of now.
Goal will be to have a poster for 1 or more national conferences and 1 or more publications.
Does this project have an international component or travel?
No
Retrospective NF1 clinical data analysis
Name:
Dr. Hans Shuhaiber
Email
hshuhaiber@ufl.edu
Phone
(312) 286-1059
Faculty Department/Division
Neurology
This project is primarily:
Clinical
Research Project Description:
EPIC retrospective char analysis of NF1 patients.
Does this project have an international component or travel?
No
If your project has an international component please give details (where, when, data collection involved, etc.):
EPIC retrospective char analysis of NF1 patients.
Improving the treatment speed and diagnostic accuracy of acute ischemic stroke
Dr. Christina Wilson
Email
christina.wilson@neurology.ufl.edu
Phone
(352) 273-5576
Faculty Department/Division
Neurology
This project is primarily:
Clinical
Research Project Description:
“Time is brain” is a common mantra in the treatment of acute ischemic stroke, as each second of an untreated stroke can result in permanent damage to over 32,000 neurons. Comprehensive stroke centers continuously strive to improve their treatment times in order to improve outcomes for patients. The UF Stroke Team has multiple ongoing projects to identify and address barriers to improving these times within specific patient populations. For example, one project is to understand factors that contribute to administration of thrombolytics later than desired (ie, greater than 30 minutes after arrival to the hospital), so that interventions can be designed to target these specific patient populations for faster treatment. Another ongoing study is to determine predictors of inaccurately-called inpatient stroke alerts as a first step towards creating targeted educational material for nursing to ensure that stroke team resources can remain focused on actual stroke patients. Other projects are available as well, and students with general interest in this area are encouraged to apply, Medical students will assist with data collection via retrospective chart review. These projects will likely lead to one or more presentations and publications, and best of all – your work will lead to improvements in the quality of stroke patient care!
Example publication: J Neurosci Nurs. 2021 Jun 1;53(3):134-139
Does this project have an international component or travel?
No
Blood biomarkers of post COVID-19 neurological complications: stroke and epilepsy
Name:
Dr. Maria Bruzzone
Email
maria.bruzzonegiraldez@neurology.ufl.edu
Phone
(352) 264-8404
Faculty Department/Division
Neurology
This project is primarily:
Clinical
Research Project Description:
Patients with COVID-19 are well recognized to be at risk of developing a wide range of neurologic manifestations of the disease. Patients can develop ischemic stroke, intracerebral hemorrhage, epilepsy, neuromuscular disease, and cognitive deficits. Currently, there is limited data regarding appropriate biomarkers that will allow for the prediction of who will develop neurologic manifestations and prognosis. We will be conducting a collaborative project evaluating blood biomarkers in COVID-19 patients with neurologic complications, including epilepsy and stroke. Students will be able to participate in this joint collaboration between Epilepsy and Stroke investigators and experience a team science approach in research.
Does this project have an international component or travel?
No
Artifical Intelligence for treating Essential Tremor in humans
Prof. Karim Oweiss
Email
koweiss@ufl.edu
Phone
(352) 294-1898
Faculty Department/Division
Neurology
This project is primarily:
Clinical
Research Project Description:
Essential Tremor (ET) is a movement disorder that results in a degraded quality of life and impaired activities of daily living for more than 7.2 million people in the US alone. Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is an effective treatment for various forms of tremor. However, it is currently unknown how to optimize DBS parameters for a given patient given the measured motor symptoms. This project seeks to develop machine learning algorithms to analyze neural and behavioral data from human patients with ET undergoing DBS with different doses. The student role is to help collect the data and learn how to develop a model that can recognize which DBS parameters were used for a given motor task. Once trained, the model will be used to predict how future setting of DBS parameters might result in specific motor task performance to ameliorate the disease symptoms.
Project funded by NIH
Does this project have an international component or travel?
No
Movement Disorders in Cardiac Arrest Survivors
Dr. Carolina Maciel
Email
carolina.maciel@neurology.ufl.edu
Phone
(917) 355-2504
Faculty Department/Division
Neurology
This project is primarily:
Clinical
Research Project Description:
Functional recovery in patients who survived a cardiac arrest is challenged by cognitive and motor disability from hypoxic-ischemic brain injury. While most research has centered on cognitive deficits, movement disorders have remained unexplored despite its high prevalence. We seek to characterize the wide gamut of movement disorders plaguing cardiac arrest survivors by developing a retrospective registry, and hypothesize that up to one in five experience any type of myoclonus, rigidity or parkinsonism. We welcome medical students to participate in data collection in this project that lies in the intersection of neurocritical care and movement disorders.
Does this project have an international component or travel?
No
Understanding Parkinson’s disease through artificial intelligence
Name:
Dr. Joshua Wong
Email
joshua.wong@neurology.ufl.edu
Phone
(352) 294-5400
Faculty Department/Division
Neurology
This project is primarily:
Clinical
Research Project Description:
Parkinson’s disease is a heterogenous disorder with a wide spectrum of clinical phenomenology. We are learning that there are some treatment approaches that are specific to certain clusters of clinical characteristics, however this concept remains incompletely understood and unexplored. Thus there is an urgent need for AI-guided patient-specific algorithms that can be individually tailored to each person’s unique disease phenotype.
We will analyze longitudinal data collected from the PPMI database and apply cutting edge machine learning techniques to identify predictive qualities of clinical outcome metrics such as motor symptoms, non-motor symptoms, need for interventional therapy, neuromodulation/DBS, hospitalizations, care-giver burden etc. The analysis will include tabular data along with neuroimaging and electrophysiology data all included in the open-access PPMI database
Students will participate in background literature review, data collection, data analysis and manuscript writing. We also encourage students to learn from our lab about the integration of AI in medicine.
Does this project have an international component or travel?
No
Neuropsychiatric symptoms in Parkinson’s disease
Name:
Dr. Greg Pontone
Email
gpontone@ufl.edu
Phone
(410) 262-1010
Faculty Department/Division
Neurology
This project is primarily:
Clinical
Research Project Description:
Participate in clinical research on neuropsychiatric symptoms in Parkinson’s disease. Research may include learning how to conduct research assessments, participant consent and enrollment, data collection, regulatory administration of studies (e.g., IRB), manuscript preparation, and fundamentals of grant preparation.
Does this project have an international component or travel?
No