Research news

Several scientific disciplines underpin each of our research projects. By combining these capabilities, we not only develop new technologies, but also new approaches to medical research.  

The Health Experience Team celebrates the publication of images

The Health Experience Team is pleased to celebrate the publication of images created in a workshop with people living with MS. The images were selected for the October 2020 cover of the Health Expectations journal and were produced in a workshop held with people living with MS who told stories about their experiences of living with MS. The images demonstrate the complex relationships that all have with MS and illuminate the perspectives of people living with MS on their lives, research and clinical encounters.  

The cover image supports the review article also published in the journal 'It struck at the heart of who I thought I was': A metasynthesis of the qualitative literature examining the experiences of people with multiple sclerosis.  

Robust Feature Engineering for Parkinson Disease Diagnosis: New Machine Learning Techniques

https://biomedeng.jmir.org/2020/1/e13611/

We have shown that features used in prior machine learning literature do not perform well when extrapolated to the much larger mPower data set on Parkinson's Disease. Owing to the natural variation in speech, the separation of people living with Parkinson's Disease and their controls is not as simple as previously believed. We presented significant performance improvements using additional novel features (with 88.6% certainty, derived from a Bayesian correlated t test) in separating patients and controls, with accuracy exceeding 58%.

Wang M, Ge W, Apthorp D, Suominen H

JMIR Biomed Eng 2020;5(1):e13611 DOI: 10.2196/13611

MS Research Toolkit

Our "Toolkit for collaboration between people living with MS and researchers" is now available. The toolkit was designed by, and for, people living with MS and researchers. It is a collection of materials to help people living with MS and researchers to understand each other and work well together.

Whether you are a person living with MS, or a person researching MS, the toolkit is designed to help you understand the perspectives of your collaborators, to work together effectively.

You can find more details here: http://anu.edu.au/MSToolkit

2019 Ian Ballard Travel Award from MS Research Australia

Dr Jo Lane was awarded the 2019 Ian Ballard Travel Award from MS Research Australia (19-0760). As part of this award she attended the Americas Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ACTRIMS) Forum 2020 in West Palm Beach, Florida where the theme of the Forum was "Networks in Multiple Sclerosis".

Dr Lane also spent a week at the Multiple Sclerosis Precision Medicine Center of Excellence, Johns Hopkins University and presented at the NeuroImmunology Seminar series on "Our Health in Our Hands: improving personalised care in multiple sclerosis". She was mentored by Associate Professor Ellen Mowry and conducted an Observership with neurologists at Johns Hopkins.

Dr Lane was mentored by Professor Helen Tremlett and her team at the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health, Faculty of Medicine (Neurology), University of British Columbia (UBC). She presented at the UBC MS Connect Session on "Improving personalised care in multiple sclerosis".

Dr Lane received positive feedback regarding the Australian National University Grand Challenge Our Health in Our Hands following her presentations and future collaborations were discussed. She is thankful to MS Research Australia for providing this opportunity to engage with and be a part of the international MS research community.

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems

The centre will help develop smaller, smarter, faster and cheaper wearable optical sensors to better monitor our health in real-time. You can learn more about it here.

New sensors open door to wearable medical diagnostic device

Scientists from The Australian National University have designed tiny optical sensors that open the door to developing a wearable device that allows doctors to medically diagnose people's health in real time.

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