The University of Texas at Dallas - Center for BrainHealth

Spring 2009 - Brain Matters

 

Pediatric Brain Injury: Heartbreak to Hope

Imagine discovering that your trusted baby nurse had shaken your tiny five-day-old daughter so violently that it was as if she had fallen headfirst from a great height—leaving her with broken bones and a severe brain injury. Now imagine that same daughter three years later—suffering from Pediatric Acquired Brain Injury (PABI) and unable to walk on her own, speak, or eat solid food for fear that she might choke on it.

That living nightmare came horrifically true for Patrick Donohue, a New York attorney. But he zealously fought back. With his help, the nurse was sentenced to prison. More importantly, he formed the Sarah Jane Brain Foundation (named for his infant girl), created in part to design the first national PABI Plan, written by the most respected scientists in the field. Among the select group chosen for the foundation’s national advisory board were Sandi Chapman, Ph.D., chief director of the Center for BrainHealth, and Lori Cook, soon-to-be Ph.D., longtime Center researcher.

PABI includes all traumatic brain injuries (including those caused by falls and violent assaults) plus brain trauma stemming from disease and battlefield-related injuries. “Over three million children suffer from brain injury each year, with most going undetected and therefore untreated. Tens of thousands are permanently disabled and thousands of our most innocent die annually,” Donohue wrote in a letter to Barack Obama, encouraging the new President to support the PABI Act of 2009 which will ask Congress “to establish Centers of Excellence in every state to ensure [the] National PABI Plan is fulfilled.” The Center for BrainHealth seems an excellent choice for the Lone Star State. The Plan is designed to implement a model system for children suffering from brain injury; the emotional and financial benefits that will accrue are staggering.

To raise awareness for the Act, a national tour will soon kick off which will include substantive panel discussions and music competitions with each performer sponsoring a PABI survivor. On May 13, the road show stops in Dallas with performances overseen by James Scott, Ph.D., dean of the University of North Texas College of Music. The tour’s climax will take place at New York’s Radio City Music Hall on June 5 (Sarah Jane’s fourth birthday), where it is hoped that the President will sign the PABI Act.

“She will” one day walk and talk, Donohue said about his little dark-haired Sarah Jane. With the dedicated support of the country’s most brilliant brain researchers (including those at the Center for BrainHealth), help might be just around the corner, for her and for millions of others.
To learn more about Sarah Jane Donohue, the PABI Act of 2009,and brain injury
(the Silent Epidemic), please visit www.thebrainproject.org.

Face Reality in the Virtual World

T. Boone Pickens stood in front of a large computer monitor and smiled. On the screen, a 3D model of a character (called an avatar) that extraordinarily resembled him returned the identical smile, down to the slight tilt of the head, in real time. Then the renowned entrepreneur, philanthropist, and generous supporter of the UT Dallas Center for BrainHealth frowned. His computerized doppelganger flashed him the exact scowl in return. The prescient businessman with the proven ability to recognize true innovation left the high-tech presentation mightily impressed.

BrainHealth researchers striving to help individuals who struggle with the processing of social information, specialists from UT Dallas and its Arts and Technology program, Ph.D.s from UT Arlington, and a handful of energetic freelance computer geniuses joined forces to create a brave new world of virtual reality technology actively employing computer-based face recognition. The goal: to explode the graphics capability, raising the realism to strengthen the user’s necessary suspension of disbelief. Thanks to their combined expertise, patients who never before knew how they came across to others (due to brain trauma, autism, ADHD, and other brain injuries and disorders) will soon be able to see for themselves their exact reactions to a variety of real world stimuli, giving them the feedback to judge if their angry or sad or confused response is appropriate. Their lives will be changed.

With this new ability, “feedback is more direct, immediate, and quantifiable,” said BrainHealth clinician Tandra Toon, affording “the opportunity to show the range of improvement over time, which would have just been subjective before.”

The advanced avatar environments expand beyond the capabilities of Second Life, the world’s largest 3D virtual world community, which was used before. The new system springing to life at BrainHealth employs a tiny, unobtrusive camera focused on the user to capture reactions and immediately place them onto the face of a computerized twin. The Center’s social cognition specialists utilized UT Arlington’s Dr. Heng Huang’s recognition software, UT Dallas’s Dr. Alice O’Toole’s database of human faces, and the intense experience of freelancers Carl Lutz and Sean Jensen (who supervised specialized computer effects on Jimmy Neutron, Ant Bully, and other films) and their talented team to geometrically expand the realism of the once-limited avatar to increase its clinical usefulness. “What we are doing here is even more cutting-edge than the latest computer-generated filmmaking,” marveled Mr. Lutz at the elevation of the Center for BrainHealth onto the upper tier of worldwide virtual reality research.

T. Boone Pickens’ avatar would smile at that.

A SMART Move, DISD to Middle Schools Nationwide

The Meadows Foundation Middle School Brain Years Pilot Program took a giant step in late February when researchers embarked to the Dallas Independent School District’s pale orange-bricked Thomas Jefferson Rusk Middle School to work with 55 eighth graders.

The initiative was created by UT Dallas Center for BrainHealth scientists to assess changes resulting from effective cognitive interventions and then train adolescents to use reasoning strategies. This type of intervention is especially important during the middle school years, when youngsters go through a critical stage of brain development, making them extremely amenable to training.

Center scientists worked closely with Rusk’s AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) eighth-grade class. The adolescents were pretested using the BrainHealth Test of Strategic Learning (TOSL©) and other reasoning measures, and the researchers found that nearly 83% of the students fell below the TOSL’s passing criteria. The students were then randomly assigned to one of three intervention groups.

The classroom interventions employed will help validate the previous results found at the Center for  BrainHealth in adolescents with ADHD utilizing the groundbreaking Strategic Memory and Reasoning Training (SMART©) program and will help determine the applicability of SMART in the typical classroom. The randomized groups of students learned either about teen brain development, basic memory techniques, or reasoning strategies, using similarly-structured seven-step pyramids of learning designed by the research team. Neither the children nor their teacher knew which participants were in the SMART program or which were in the alternative groups. Upon completion of the ten hour-long sessions, the children were post-tested to ascertain the effectiveness of each intervention.

The researchers, Christy Matthews, Ph.D., Elizabeth Hull, and Anne Holland, all under the leadership of Jacque Gamino, Ph.D., found the students receptive and positive. Also garnering their praises was teacher Jennifer Tecklenburg, whose eighth graders were chosen to participate by the DISD.

The BrainHealth team is busy analyzing the results of the interventions. The process will begin afresh at the Francisco “Pancho” Medrano Middle School; the results of the over 100 students participating at the schools will be presented to the state legislature this spring. The goal is to validate the effectiveness of SMART, then to continue efforts to implement the program statewide and beyond. What began in Miss Tecklenburg’s class at Rusk may eventually touch every middle schooler in the nation.

In addition, The Meadows Foundation has funded the creation of "The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk" at The University of Texas at Austin that addresses literacy issues. For more information, please go to http://www.meadowscenter.org.

BrainHealth Research


Asha Kuppachi Vas, Doctoral Student
Rehabilitation and Adult Traumatic Brain Injury

The reported occurrences of adult traumatic brain injury (TBI) continue to rise due to increases in the number of war and sports injuries as well as more widespread awareness of symptoms. Government agencies and medical facilities acknowledge that TBI rehabilitation needs to be better addressed, since after traditional treatments patients often still have higher-level cognitive deficits that detrimentally affect their daily lives. BrainHealth researchers are working to develop and test unique cognitive behavioral treatment programs designed to target, measure, and improve higher-level critical thinking skills. The goal is to rehabilitate and reignite skills necessary for a better quality of life for TBI survivors over the long term.

Michelle Kandalaft, Doctoral Student
New Wave Technology and Cognitive Training

Using computers as fun, reinforcing tools that allow hands-on learning, Center experts on social information processing are helping those with impaired social abilities interact more effectively with others. BrainHealth team members work to create and perfect innovative technologies (for example, virtual world environments and the newest wave of gaming software) that have direct clinical applications to help children with ADHD, pervasive developmental disabilities, and brain injuries reach goals that translate into real-world triumphs. The Center, too, networks with the best technological whizzes to expand the possibilities of computerized interventions to help the greatest number of children in need.


Michelle McClelland, B.S.
Raising Levels of Fluid Reasoning

Center researchers exploring fluid reasoning (problem solving that involves new and unfamiliar information) devised a behavioral study examining four populations: a control group and those with Asperger’s syndrome, traumatic brain injury (TBI), and schizophrenia. Participants were asked to identify a relationship between two or more objects in one cartoon and relate it to figures in a separate animated panel. Conditions varied by the insertion of distractions and the complexity of the relationships depicted. Results show that Asperger’s and schizophrenic groups perform slightly lower than controls while TBI participants perform significantly below all groups. The hope is to identify conditions that cause reasoning deficits in order to develop better treatments.


Gail Tillman, Ph.D.
Hormones, Aging, and Cognition

Hormones are among the most abundant and influential chemicals produced by humans, regulating everything from metabolism and reproduction to mental processing and emotional response. Current research aims to establish the benefits of maintaining healthy hormone levels. BrainHealth scientists are using information about hormone levels in saliva samples from both young adults and healthy aging populations to determine how hormones affect thinking ability and emotional processing as well as discover ways to maintain brain health as people age. Once the collection of preliminary data is completed, additional funding avenues will be explored to continue and expand the study of hormones and their myriad affects on neurocognitive processing.


Leadership Spotlight

“Given my active lifestyle and the multiple, diverse activities requiring my attention each day, I was curious to know how I could improve my own brain’s function—to store, reason, and learn information more easily,” Matt Strickland, a new face on BrainHealth’s Advisory Board, explained.

Active is right. The 31-year-old vice president of a Dallas real estate development firm, who also serves on the Center’s Golf Tournament Committee, plays golf, snow skis, climbs mountains (he recently scaled Africa’s Mt. Kilimanjaro and Europe’s Mt. Blanc), enjoys expanding his knowledge of wine when he finds himself on solid ground, and takes Spanish language lessons at night. And besides toiling hard for BrainHealth, he also devotes time to the Dallas Museum of Art and Presbyterian Hospital, among other causes close to his heart.

The SMU grad and native Arizonan believes “the Center for BrainHealth will be involved with all major brain breakthroughs in the next 100 years,” and he wanted to play his part, supporting “initiatives targeted at protecting and healing those at risk.” His Board experience has even allowed him to become better aware of mechanisms of the mind. For instance? The mountain climber was delighted to learn from the Center’s 2009 lecture series “the importance of sleeping in. Your brain best restores itself early in the morning,” he said with a smile.

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“Knowledge does not go to waste,” she said.“You just have to wait for the right time to
use it.”

Once hired at BrainHealth, Rebecca Peterson hit the ground running, employing
knowledge she already had and learning new things at a demolition derby pace. “I love
working at BrainHealth,” she said. “I try to impart the knowledge I’ve gained here to my
friends and family” to make them more brain aware. As the right hand of Chief Director
Sandi Chapman, Ph.D., for the last two years, Rebecca has functioned as the major liaison in all areas involving the Center’s renovated new home: landscaping, construction, installations of state-of-the-art audio-visual systems, procuring appliances and equipment.
In between anticipating and eliminating growing pains, she masterfully
juggles Dr. Chapman’s calendar like a Cirque du Soleil headliner, plans
meetings, entertains visiting dignitaries fascinated by BrainHealth research,
and rewrites daily the dictionary’s definition of “administrative assistant.”

“I believe this has been the busiest position I’ve ever had,” the auburnhaired
Rebecca laughed as she scanned the flood of papers cascading across
her desk. Her workload is decided by what “the little blonde tornado,” as
she refers to the chief director, determines to tackle each day. “My job is to
make her job easier,” Rebecca said. Applying that knowledge should keep
her in good stead for years to come.

U.S. Senator Visits BrainHealth

United States Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison toured the UT Dallas Center for BrainHealth to learn in greater detail about its latest research initiatives, including the one-of-a-kind BrainHealth Physical, SMART and middle schools, and traumatic brain injuries suffered during battle. A staunch supporter of the men and women who serve in the American armed forces, the senator was gratified to hear of the Center’s “research that will help our veterans.”