Master's Thesis Project
The project started early in 2020, where research and familiarization with MATLAB and fMRI begun for Miguel as a brand new graduate student at the University of Arizona. Each individual component was designed, implemented, tested, and debugged over the next several months along with attending courses and performing other laboratory duties. Eventually the majority of the application was completed towards the end of the year, and initial data analysis was promising. Further tuning, and data analysis showed successful implementation of the Multiscale Sample Entropy algorithm, and work on the research paper began. The paper was accepted for review, and Miguel received his master's degree in biomedical engineering from The University of Arizona. The paper was later published in the Journal of Neuroimaging titled "Brain function complexity during dual-tasking is associated with cognitive impairment and age".
A subsection of the application can be utilized for automating preprocessing of DICOM files, which outputs NIfTI files for further processing. Another subsection was for ensuring that all data was centered, and ready for subsequent pre-processing steps. Finally, the program can run Multiscale Sample Entropy analysis on a voxel-by-voxel basis per NIfTI file, and results are saved to an Excel sheet for further data analysis with the JMP statistical software.
Technology Utilized
- MATLAB by Mathworks
- SPM12 for fMRI preprocessing
- Microsoft Excel
- JMP Statistical Software
- Microsoft Word