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$3.1 million for NMRC
Bioengineering team grant pumps up muscle research

By Hope Green

Whether it’s a pair of hands subtly interpreting Chopin on a piano keyboard or the deceptively simple act of walking, every movement of the body is controlled by distinct patterns of electronic pulses decoded, thousands at a time, by individual muscle fibers.

	Carlo DeLuca is director of the NeuroMuscular Research Center and principal investigator in a five-year multidisciplinary project that will provide new insight into disorders of the central nervous system. Photo by Fred Sway

Scientists such as ENG Professor Carlo De Luca, founding director of Boston University’s NeuroMuscular Research Center (NMRC), have been engaged for almost three decades in interpreting these pulsating signals transmitted from brain to muscle.

Victims of stroke and spinal cord injuries could one day benefit from their research. But until now, the technology for signal processing has been far too cumbersome to be useful outside the laboratory.

This could soon change. The NMRC recently received a $3.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to design and test an exponentially faster, more accurate system than now exists for investigating motor control in humans. BU is one of the first 27 institutions to receive the award from NIH’s National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research, out of approximately 300 groups that applied.

Renewable after five years, the Bioengineering Research Partnership Grant supports a multidisciplinary team of scientists at BU, New York Medical College, and Hôpital Erasme-U.L.B., an academic medical center in Brussels. It will also fund research by five BU graduate students and more than a dozen undergraduates.

De Luca, principal investigator for the team, says the new technology developed through this grant will make it possible to explore "a whole world of physiological questions we haven’t been able to touch" using current methods.

Among the most critical of these questions is what happens to the way our central nervous system controls our muscles as we age. De Luca and co—principal investigator Zeynep Erim, a research assistant professor at NMRC, have gathered preliminary data showing that the code from the brain to the muscles changes and seems to become less effective at generating force.

"We want to take that one step further," De Luca says, "and look at whether different kinds of exercise can make the workings of the central nervous system, with respect to controlling muscle fiber, revert back to its youthful pattern."

Another priority for the team is to understand the degree to which signals from the brain and spinal cord are disrupted in people with diseases like stroke, Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy, and multiple sclerosis.

At present, clinicians have no ways to quantify nervous system disorders as they can with other organs of the body.

"If something goes wrong with the liver, you can draw blood and do an enzyme test," De Luca says. "If something goes wrong with the heart, you can measure blood pressure and take an EKG. But when you think of central nervous system diseases, there are no technologies that allow the clinician to measure, in an objective way, the degree of the injury. Our technology will change that."

A third clinical study will investigate control signals sent to the larynx that affect breathing and speech.

Clinical trials of the signal-decomposition technology will begin within a few years. Responsible for the sophisticated software design is Associate Professor Hamid Nawab, associate chairman of undergraduate studies at ENG’s electrical and computer engineering department.

On the surface, the method for measuring electric pulses in muscle will appear much the way it has for 20 years: a fine needle containing four tiny wire sensors is inserted into a muscle fiber and linked to a computer. What will change is the computer setup. The present system was considered an exciting breakthrough when it was designed in the early 1980s, but it is also excruciatingly slow and unreliable, involving a six-foot-tall mechanical assembly and two full-size PCs.

"It has been a useful tool in the research environment and has helped us answer some important physiological questions," De Luca says, "but it is useless outside the laboratory. It can take up to two months to analyze a muscle contraction of 15 seconds. We’re going to be developing a system that works with a different concept of artificial intelligence, which Professor Nawab has been investigating for some time."

With the assistance of Donald Gilmore, senior design engineer at NMRC, the scientists will streamline the equipment to an 8-by-10-inch box and a laptop computer. The new system will enable researchers to complete calculations 100 times faster and bring their work into a clinical setting.

The NIH’s initiative to fund projects of this nature – teaming up experts in fields as diverse as physiology, computer science, and engineering – reflects "a major change in philosophy" for the government agency, says De Luca.

"This is the first time it has provided the possibility for awards of this size and magnitude, with this potential impact, to go directly to the bioengineering community," he says. "We’re pleased that the NIH is broadening its horizons."

For more information about the NMRC, visit http://nmrc.bu.edu.

7 February 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations