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Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons

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Medicine and Health Sciences

Virginia Commonwealth University

Theses/Dissertations

Parkinson's Disease

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering

Development Of A Torque-Based Device For The Quantification Of Arm Rigidity In Patients With Parkinson’S Disease, Georgina O. Miller Jan 2020

Development Of A Torque-Based Device For The Quantification Of Arm Rigidity In Patients With Parkinson’S Disease, Georgina O. Miller

Theses and Dissertations

Parkinsonian rigidity is caused by the inability of the muscles to relax and extend properly, due to reduced dopamine levels and often begins on one side of the body before spreading contralaterally. The current standard for determining joint rigidity in a clinical setting is a test completed by the clinician based on the feel of the relaxed wrist and elbow joints as they are passively flexed and extended and a series of ordinal rating scales, the Movement Disorder Society’s – Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS), Hoehn and Yahr Scale (H&Y), and Parkinson’s Disease Questionnaire-39 (PDQ-39). These methods are used …


Development Of Novel Models To Study Deep Brain Effects Of Cortical Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, Farheen Syeda Jan 2018

Development Of Novel Models To Study Deep Brain Effects Of Cortical Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, Farheen Syeda

Theses and Dissertations

Neurological disorders require varying types and degrees of treatments depending on the symptoms and underlying causes of the disease. Patients suffering from medication-refractory symptoms often undergo further treatment in the form of brain stimulation, e.g. electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), deep brain stimulation (DBS), or transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). These treatments are popular and have been shown to relieve various symptoms for patients with neurological conditions. However, the underlying effects of the stimulation, and subsequently the causes of symptom-relief, are not very well understood. In particular, TMS is a non-invasive brain stimulation therapy which uses time-varying magnetic …