Science&Health: Student research looks at mysteries of the brain

Through a narrow alleyway off Westwood Boulevard, past a set of double doors and up a flight of stairs, Edward Lau is part of an international effort to piece together a comprehensive atlas of the human brain.

“Our researcher wanted to find a few landmarks on the brain,” the second-year bioengineering student said. “So we skull-stripped 80 cases to make a 3-D composite.”

The task is remarkably bloodless, because Lau is not decapitating an actual patient. Rather, he works with a series of magnetic resonance images, and a few clicks of the mouse cleanly separates bone from brain.

“We draw a contour around the image so (the computer) recognizes the brain matter from the skull,” he said.

For the past quarter, Lau has been working for UCLA’s Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, established with the express goal of linking structure and function in one of the body’s most impenetrable organs.

“I checked the SRP (Student Research Program) Web site and lo and behold, there was an open slot,” he said. “I want to go into brain-computer interfacing, so I thought this would be a good introduction.”

His current work revolves around “the pipeline,” a network of computer programs that fully automate the analysis process. Once fed into the system, the scripts perform myriad actions on the image, including measuring the brain’s volume and inflating and halving its two hemispheres.

Lau’s rudimentary background in programming also came in handy when tasked to maintain the network.

“I bought a Mac over the summer and kind of got a basic understanding of UNIX,” he said. “When I told them I had programming experience, they started throwing some of these jobs at me.”

The brain remains one of the least understood organs. As a nurse with clinical experience, Stacy Serber has seen its complexity firsthand.

“I have seen patients with damage to their Broca’s area (the section of the brain involving speech and language) who can’t talk, but we can make them sing (to communicate),” Serber said. “If you look at a heart, you can take it out and point out all the ventricles and blood vessels. But the brain is not as cut-and-dry with discretely oriented areas.”

Researchers are slowly beginning to draw associations between neurological conditions and physical brain features. Working in the same lab as Lau, fifth-year neuroscience student Sona Babakchanian is comparing MRIs of children whose mothers had substance abuse during pregnancy.

“We’re looking at the effects of prenatal methamphetamine and alcohol use on the fetus’ brain,” she said. “The first thing I did was delineate the corpus callosum (portion connecting the two cerebral hemispheres) in each scan, then compare them to each other and to a control (of a normal brain).”

Like most undergraduates pursuing research in the life sciences, both Lau and Babakchanian are considering futures in medicine. But their current projects still provide valuable experience.

“My career goals are medicine, but research is also something I really enjoy,” Babakchanian said. “There are so many things we still don’t know about neuroscience.”

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