Thesis Project Form

One of the challenges for the conduction of therapeutic clinical trials in Friedreich’s ataxia (FA) is the development of outcome measures. The intricate interplay between cerebellar degeneration, somatosensory loss and muscle atrophy leads to explore functional changes over time and to prove the sensitivity to change of the outcome measures. The Scale for the Assessment and Rating of Ataxia (SARA) for functional assessments has been recognized as the most sensitive scale in a longitudinal analysis of FA patients in comparison with ICARS and FARS. Meanwhile, few studies on gait are conducted and focused only on spatio-temporal parameters or on adults. Moreover, no studies investigated motor synergies and spinal maps longitudinally in FA; although synergies have been already suggested as physiological marker and they are able to describe muscles coordination that is a typical motor symptom of FA.

The aim of this work is to study the correlation between clinical and objective assessment, and to identify which parameters better reflect disease severity in terms of sensitivity to change in a longitudinal evaluation of children and adolescent. We will extract standard features (kinematic and kinetics) from gait analysis and synergies and spinal maps from EMG signals. We want to understand by features selection algorithms which are the features that better describe disease in the single session and in the longitudinal evaluation.

The student will learn:
- to use Nexus software end to extract raw data from a gait analysis system
- to develop data analysis tools
- to improve the knowledge of Matlab and statistical data analysis
- to work in a team with people with different backgrounds (engineers, physicians, physical therapists) and with people with disability