It is known that systematic visual distortions using virtual reality technologies, prisms or mirrors, may have therapeutic effects for patients suffering from stroke or body image identity disorders. In this study we use an existing experimental setup to investigate the effects of systematic virtual reality-mediated visual feedback scaling of finger movements on cortical activity.

The goal of this project is to quantify the percentage of thalamic synapses in layer 4 of the auditory cortex of mice.
During this project the student will learn to perform stereotaxic surgery, use viral tracers, use confocal and electron microscopy, stereological sampling methods and perform immunohistochemistry protocols.

Assistive rehabilitation robots are currently a hot topic for movement function recovery after a neurologic incident. Many of these systems are providing assistance based on estimated optimal movement trajectories, while neglecting the therapist, an experienced long-trained source of information. In this project you will extent an existing rehabilitation robot setup for measuring patient-therapist interaction.

In primates, carnivorous and ungulates, neurons with similar function group themselves columnarly forming a map of orientation preference. Although the outward projections from these neurons have been explored in detail, the location of neurons that project to a specific point in cortex have not. In this masters project, you will extend an existing set of Matlab scripts and algorithms for flattening cortical reconstructions, identifying clusters of labelled neurons and aligning these reconstructions with 2D maps of cortical function.