Spinal Cord Injury: Automatic Scoring of Motor Function

描述(申请人提供)：意外伤害引起的运动功能障碍，中风和神经退行性疾病，以及精神健康障碍，是人类最严重的疾病。机械性损伤的一个常见结果是脊髓损伤(SCI)，即脊髓因挫伤、压迫或撕裂而受损，导致损伤点以下的感觉、运动和反射功能丧失。脊髓损伤的其他症状可能包括肠道和膀胱功能障碍、痛觉过敏和性功能障碍。尽管许多脊髓损伤患者幸存下来，但最常见的结果是严重的慢性功能障碍。美国每年大约有10,000例新的脊髓损伤(SCI)病例。与相对较少的急性患者人口相比，慢性脊髓损伤在这个国家涉及大约200,000-250,000人，从人力和经济成本来看，对社会来说都是极其昂贵的。由于大多数脊髓损伤患者受伤时年龄在30岁以下，而且大多数人现在的寿命接近正常，因此每个患者一生中直接医疗费用平均为200万美元，仅在美国每年约为50亿美元。因此，任何 能够积极改善脊髓损伤患者生活质量的药物或干预措施，可能会产生比单纯从每年的急性损伤费用中预期的更大的经济影响。脊髓损伤和其他影响步态和运动协调的疾病的动物模型今天被成功地用于开发新的治疗方法。在动物模型中评估运动功能障碍的水平是一项艰巨的挑战，因为大多数研究人员依赖于症状的主观评分。我们建议建立一个系统，可以更客观、更快、更一致地评估脊髓损伤大鼠和小鼠模型的损伤程度和恢复过程，将来可以应用于其他步态和运动协调障碍。将开发一个基于计算机视觉的人工智能系统来捕捉和评分啮齿动物的步态和运动协调能力，并将根据Basso，Beattie和Bresna han(1995)的方法获得的大鼠脊髓损伤模型的标准运动功能评分进行验证。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Disorders of motor function due to accidental injury, stroke and neurodegenerative disorders, together with disorders of mental health, are the most crippling human ailments. One common result of mechanical insult is spinal cord injury (SCI), in which damage of the spinal cord by contusion, compression or laceration causes loss of sensation, motor and reflex function below the point of injury. Other symptoms of SCI may include bowel and bladder dysfunction, hyperalgesia and sexual dysfunction. Although many SCI patients survive injury, major chronic dysfunction is the most common outcome. There are approximately 10,000 new cases of spinal cord injury (SCI) in the U.S each year. In contrast to the relatively small acute patient population, chronic SCI, involving approximately 200,000-250,000 people in this country, is extremely expensive to society, both in terms of human and economic costs. Because most SCI victims are under age 30 at the time of their injury, and most now live a near-normal life span, direct medical costs average $2 million per patient over a lifetime, and approximately $5 billion total per year in the US only. Therefore, any drug or intervention that can positively improve the quality of life of patients suffering from SCI is likely to have a greater financial impact than would be expected simply from the cost of acute injury each year. Animal models for SCI and other conditions that affect gait and motor coordination are successfully used today to develop new treatments. Assessing the level of motor dysfunction in an animal model is a difficult challenge as most researchers rely on the subjective scoring of symptoms. We propose here to build a system that will allow a more objective, faster and consistent assessment of the level of injury and course of recovery in rat and mouse models of SCI that can be applied in the future to other gait and motor coordination disorders. An artificial intelligent system based on computer vision will be developed to capture and score gait and motor coordination in rodents and will be validated against the standard scores of motor function obtained using the methods of Basso, Beattie, and Bresnahan (1995) for the rat model of SCI.