Hi, my name is Elizabeth Dessalier and I'll be presenting the Impact of Cerebellar Transperineal Simulation on Hemonic and Motor Cortical Neurocorrelation. This is an in vivo study with physiological verification. This was performed by Alushka and myself as part of our research project this year. So our research focuses on the pathway that connects the cerebellum, thalamus, and motor cortex as illustrated in figure one. The cerebellum is responsible for receiving sensory information related to movement. Things like where the body is in space, which is called proprioception, gets analyzed here. And this is then gets sent on to the thalamus, specifically the ventral medial and ventral lateral regions, and then relayed to the motor cortex for motor cortex planning and execution. While we know each of these regions of the brain are important for motor control, we're still unsure of the precise mechanism in which they communicate. It's critical to understand these pathways because there's this disease called cerebellar ataxia that causes severe impairment in coordination and can be debilitating to anyone afflicted with it. And in an attempt to better understand this pathway, we used route models to measure the effects of stimulation to the cerebellum on the motor cortex and thalamic activity all at one time. We hypothesized that the stimulation would cause a correlated increase in activity in these two areas. So the surgery setup, we included drilling four holes, two for each, two on each side of the brain that correlate to regions of the motor cortex in the upper region and then BLM and BM in the lower region. That's kind of illustrated in figure one as well. We then stuck two probes in them and calculated the depth of each side of the probe on the opposite side of the cerebellum. We took it a step further to make sure we were in those regions by using the histological analysis, which we cut the brain into different sections, froze it after sending an electrical implosive buffer in the brain, and then we could see exactly where our probe was. And that was just to make sure that we were in the actual region because it is such a tiny brain and we wanted to make sure that we were actually measuring the right thing. We used the recording to perform power spectrum and coherence study using MATLAB analysis during each of these conditions, which were non-stimulatory for five minutes, stimulatory for 20 minutes, and five minutes after stimulation, no stimulation as well. We used a parity test to see if there's any significant difference between the two related regions. And additionally, we set the conditions, which the firing rate of the bomb is decreased after stimulation called the inhibitory, and check to see if there's any difference in there as well. In all, we found no significant difference when comparing all the data. However, when we separated out the inhibitory, we were a significant difference of firing rates between pre-stimulation and stimulation. A p-value of 0.035 was calculated. Decrease was not due to chance alone, as well as there was a difference in inhibitory stimulation and post-stimulation thalamic power spectrum under high-frequency conditions. This suggests that the inhibitory stimulation had an effect on neural activity in the thalamus. Specifically, we may have altered the power or frequency distribution of neural oscillations in response to high-frequency conditions. We also found that histological analysis proved to work. We were able to collect data in the correct areas and verify it via histological presentation. So, while there was no correlation between the motor cortex and thalamus during normal situations, we would like to further investigate inhibitory conditions in the future by taking more sample data and analyzing only inhibitory, but having an end that's much higher than what we had. Thank you.

cerebellar transperineal stimulation

motor cortex

thalamic cortical neurocorrelation

inhibitory conditions

cerebellar ataxia