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Background: Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is associated with phonological awareness, reading, and spelling deficits. Comparing literacy skills in CAS with other developmental speech disorders is critical for understanding the complexity of the disorder. Aims: This study compared the phonological awareness and reading development of children with CAS and children with inconsistent speech... [Journal Article]

Background and Objectives Osteopathy in the cranial field (OCF) is a contentious area of manual therapy. The literature base has attracted much debate, and consists of theories, anecdotal claims and limited academic research. As such, the potential mechanisms and effects of OCF remain poorly understood. Current research into the physiological effects of OCF is directed toward changes in...

Hemineglect and unilateral extinction on double simultaneous stimulation in humans are neuropsychological disorders which sometimes follow a lesion to the cortex, subcortex or basal ganglia of one cerebral hemisphere. The main symptom is that the patient appears to neglect or be unaware of stimuli which impinge in one half of space relative to the patient's body. The side of space... [Thesis or Dissertation]

Huntington disease (HD) is a progressive, autosomal dominantly inherited, neurodegenerative disease that is characterised by involuntary movements (chorea), cognitive decline and psychiatric manifestations. HD is one of a number of late-onset neurodegenerative diseases caused by expanded glutamine repeats, with a likely similar biochemical basis. It has been suggested that the disease-causing... [Thesis or Dissertation]

Thesis embargoed until August 2010.[no abstract available] [Thesis or Dissertation]

Auckland Medical Research Foundation. Foundation for Research, Science and Technology. The University of Auckland.Progressive degeneration in the central nervous system (CNS) of Huntington’s disease (HD) patients is a relentless debilitating process, resulting from the inheritance of a single gene mutation. With limited knowledge of the underlying pathological molecular mechanisms, pharmaceutical intervention has to-date not provided any effective clinical treatment strategies to attenuate or compensate... [Thesis or Dissertation]

Dendritic spines are fundamental units of information processing within the nervous system, responsible for independent modulation of synaptic input to neurons. Filopodia, often morphologically indistinguishable from spines, are involved in formation of synapses during neuronal development. Despite the importance of these structures for neuronal function, no detailed study of their presence on... [Thesis or Dissertation]

As you’re all aware, interest in the cervical VEMPs was revived by Colebatch and Halmagyi in the early 1990s. Stimulation of the saccule with a loud acoustic stimulus causes a transient inhibition of the ipsilateral sternocleidomastoid muscle via this pathway creating a waveform that looks like this. It’s an incredibly useful objective test of otolith function that has found many uses. [Event]

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Background and Objectives: Spinal mobilisation is commonly used in the field of manual medicine to address lumbar joint dysfunction. In addition, lumbar mobilisation has been proposed as a method to improve lower limb neurodynamic mobility, however, there is no published research to support this hypothesis. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of a posterior-to-anterior lumbar...

The detection of epileptiform discharges (ED’s) in the electroencephalogram (EEG) is an important component in the diagnosis of epilepsy. However, when the epileptogenic source is located deep in the brain, the ED’s at the scalp are often masked by more superficial, higher-amplitude EEG activity. A noninvasive technique which uses an adaptive “beamformer” spatial filter has been... [Journal Article]

The fractal dimension (FD) of EEG has been shown to be of value in the detection of epileptic seizures. In this paper, we assess its usefulness in detecting behavioural microsleeps. Fifteen non-sleep-deprived normal subjects performed two 1-hour sessions of a continuous tracking task while EEG, EOG and facial video were recorded. Higuchi’s algorithm was used to calculate the FD of the EEG.... [Conference Paper]

CD ROMThis paper outlines a novel approach to wavelet based detection of epileptiform activity in the EEG. A special complex-valued wavelet filter is used in a continuous wavelet transform (CWT). The response of wavelet coefficients (WCs) to euileutiform discharges (EDs) is measured with artifact-free background and definite EDs is achieved. A detector based on the WCs of this scale could operate at... [Conference Item]

An adaptive ‘beamformer’ spatial filter has been investigated for the enhancement of signals from deep sources in the brain suspected of being epileptiform discharges (EDs). A forward 3-D inhomogeneous spherical model that relates a dipolar source to recorded signals is used to determine the beamformer’s spatial response constraints. The beamformer adapts, using the least mean squares... [Conference Item]

The technique of multireference adaptive noise canceling(MRANC) is applied to enhance transient nonstationarities in the electroencephalogram(EEG), with the adaptation implemented by means of a multilayer-perceptron artificial neural network (ANN). The method was applied to recorded EEG segments and the performance on documented nonstationarities recorded. The results show that the neural... [Journal Article]

It is critically important for certain occupational groups to remain highly alert throughout their working day. For safety reasons, it would be useful to automatically detect lapses in performance using EEG/EOG. Automating the detection process could be simplified considerably if we could mimic human experts. Surprisingly, it is unclear to what extent human EEG raters are able to detect lapses.... [Conference Item]

CDROMAn algorithm has been developed for detection of epileptiform activity in the EEG. The EEG is divided into overlapping epochs, which undergo two steps. The first is singular value decomposition (SVD) which identifles the number of uncorrelated active sources sources in an epoch.In the second step, EEG dipole source analysis, using a single dipole model, is applied to the EEG. This yields dipole... [Conference Item]

A system is proposed which utilises Kohonen’s selforganising feature map (SOFM) to help detect the presence of epileptiform transients in the EEG. The system consists of a feature extractor, which employs a mimetic approach to detect candidate epileptiform transients (CETs) on individual channels in the multichannel recording, followed by a trained SOFM. The SOFM system is proposed as a... [Conference Paper]

A system has been developed which utilises fuzzy logic to perform spatial analysis of the multichannel EEG recording and forms the final stage of a multi-stage system to detect the presence of epileptiform events (EVs) in the EEG. This spatial-combiner consists of a set of 127 fuzzy-rules which define our expectation of the spatial distribution of an EV as measured across a 4- channel bipolar... [Conference Item]

A system is proposed which enhances transient nonstationarities and, in particular, epileptiform discharges in the EEG. It is based around the technique of multireference adaptive noise cancelling (MRANC) which attenuates the background EEG on a primary channel by using spatial and temporal information from adjacent channels in the multichannel EEG recording. This process has been implemented... [Conference Paper]

To determine the functional significance of the sodium-transport mechanisms of the outer hair cells (OHCs) in vivo, the effect of reduced perilymphatic sodium on cochlear potentials was investigated in the guinea pig by perfusion of scala tympani with a modified artificial perilymph. The Na+ concentration of the artificial perilymph was reduced by almost 95% (from 150 mM to 8 mM) by... [Conference Poster]

Background and Aim: This study investigated the effectiveness of an integrated phonological awareness approach for children with Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS). Change in speech, phonological awareness, letter knowledge, word decoding, and spelling skills were examined. Method: A controlled multiple single-subject design was employed. Twelve children aged 4-7 years with CAS participated in... [Journal Article]

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The aim of this thesis was to validate the use of infrared thermography (IRT) to non-invasively measure stress and/or pain in cattle. The main approach was to measure changes in heat emitted from superficial capillaries around the eye (referred to as eye temperature) in response to various aversive husbandry procedures used routinely on farms. In addition, various exogenous challenges were... [Thesis or Dissertation]