Sunday, February 26, 2006

It's not exactly sliced bread...

I think I may have invented something. I mentioned before that I'm working in my neuro prof's lab, where we are studying nerve regeneration utilizing polyethylene glycol for rapid fusion of crushed axons (sciatic nerves in rats). Exposing and crushing the nerve is no problem, but applying the electrodes and taking the readings is problematic. The way they've been doing it, the stimulating electrode is applied to the proximal end of the nerve (closer to the body), and the recording electrode is applied to the distal end (closer to the foot), with the electrodes pressed on top of the nerve and making incidental contact with the muscle and connective tissue below and surrounding the nerve. The stimulating electrode sends a little shock down the nerve, and the recording electrode reads the magnitude of signal produced. Because the extraneous tissue conducts electricity, often interfering signals will appear on the oscilloscope obscuring the nice, smooth action potential curve; the electrodes also often do not make consistent or sufficient surface area contact with the nerve to produce a readable signal. So these were some things I noticed in the last couple of weeks of observations. I asked my professor if there were any better setups for the electrodes that he was aware of - not to his (extensive) knowledge. I had some initial ideas for how to solve the above problems, but I couldn't quite decide on the material to use. So I stopped by the local toy shop for some ideas. I ran across something quite absurd that might actually work. To my surprise, when I ran the idea past my professor, he thought it was excellent. So now I get to go toy shopping for lab next week. I hope my idea works!

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

cool magyver story. change it a little and patent it, then you can blog full time :)

3/02/2006 04:23:00 PM  
Blogger Ali said...

heh, or at least pay for med school. :)

3/02/2006 04:31:00 PM  

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