Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons^™

Design And Validation Of A Mr-Compatible Pneumatic Manipulandum, Aaron J. Suminski, Janice L. Zimbelman, Robert A. Scheidt

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

The combination of functional MR imaging and novel robotic tools may provide unique opportunities to probe the neural systems underlying motor control and learning. Here, we describe the design and validation of a MR-compatible, 1 degree-of-freedom pneumatic manipulandum along with experiments demonstrating its safety and efficacy. We first validated the robot's ability to apply computer-controlled loads about the wrist, demonstrating that it possesses sufficient bandwidth to simulate torsional spring-like loads during point-to-point flexion movements. Next, we verified the MR-compatibility of the device by imaging a head phantom during robot operation. We observed no systematic differences in two measures of MRI …