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Daniel W. Moran

URL: http://news-info.wustl.edu/sb/page/normal/583.html

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Tony Fitzpatrick
Senior Science Editor
tony_fitzpatrick@wustl.edu
(314) 935-5272

Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering

Expertise: biomedical engineering, voluntary motor control, motor cortical activity, motor learning, neural plasticity

Bio:
Moran
Moran
Daniel W. Moran, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, focuses his research on the areas of voluntary motor control. He also has a research interest in the areas of motor learning and neural plasticity. He is currently affiliated with the Society for Neuroscience, the Society for the Neural Control of Movement, the American Society of Biomechanics, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology.

WUSTL Contact Information:
Work:(314) 935-8836
Fax:(314) 935-7448
E-mail:dmoran@biomed.wustl.edu
Address:Campus Box 1097
One Brookings Dr.
St. Louis, MO 63130

Education:


News Stories & Tip Sheets:

Showing 2 Stories.
Imagine that

Teenager first to play video game by brain only (http://news-info.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/7800.html)

Oct. 9, 2006 --
Researchers have enabled a 14-year-old to play a two-dimensional video game using signals from his brain instead of his hands.
Photo by David Kilper / WUSTL Photo
Researchers have enabled a 14-year-old to play a two-dimensional video game using signals from his brain instead of his hands.
Download
Teenage boys and computer games go hand-in-hand. Now, a St. Louis-area teenage boy and a computer game have gone hands-off, thanks to a unique experiment conducted by a team of neurosurgeons, neurologists, and engineers at Washington University in St. Louis. The boy, a 14-year-old who suffers from epilepsy, is the first teenager to play a two-dimensional video game, Space Invaders, using only the signals from his brain to make movements. More... (http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/7800.html)


Figuring out your next move

Researcher shows what we learn and how we learn (http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/5858.html)

Oct. 5, 2005 --
Thoroughman (background) and Taylor tracked the moves that people make.
Photo by David Kilper / WUSTL Photo
Thoroughman (background) and Taylor tracked the moves that people make.
Download
Practice makes perfect when people learn behaviors, from baseball pitching to chess playing to public speaking. Biomedical engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have now identified how people use individual experiences to improve performance.



Showing 2 Stories.
Clips:

Showing 3 Clips.
Teenager moves video icons by imagination
United Press International and 2 others

Oct. 11, 2006 -- A U.S. boy has become the first teenager to play a two-dimensional video game using only the signals from his brain to make movements.
WUSTL researchers led by neurological surgery professor Eric Leuthardt and biomedical engineering professor Daniel Moran say the boy's achievement might lead to creation of biomedical devices that can control artificial limbs, enabling the movement of a prosthesis by just thinking about it.


Brain Power: Mind Control of External Devices
Associated Press Online, LiveScience.com (New York) and 25 others

March 17, 2005 -- New coverage on this topic -- Researchers and volunteers around the world are taking early steps toward a complex but straightforward technological goal: to use electrical signals from the brain as instructions to computers and other machines, allowing paralyzed people to communicate, move around and control their environment literally without moving a muscle.
Most dramatically, that could help "locked-in" patients - those who've lost all muscle movement because of conditions like Lou Gehrig's disease or brainstem strokes.
Article mentions research at WUSTL, where surgeons placed tiny electrodes on the surface of the brains of four people recently, they achieved accuracies of 74 percent to 100 percent with just three to 24 minutes of training.


Patients play by power of thought
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) and 20 others

June 16, 2004 -- Using thought alone and with electrodes placed on the surface of the brain, four volunteers were able to control a simple video game, U.S. researchers report. Simply by thinking the word "move," the volunteers played the game.
"We are using pure imagination. These people are not moving their limbs," said Eric Leuthardt, a neurosurgeon at the School of Medicine who worked on the study. Writing in the Journal of Neural Engineering, Leuthardt and Daniel Moran, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the School of Medicine, said the patients learned in minutes how to control a computer cursor.



Additional Background: Moran's primary research interest is in the area of voluntary motor control. There are two major categories within this general topic being pursued. The first is a neural engineering pursuit where implantable cortical devices are used to provide a robust and high fidelity control signal for the restoration of voluntary movement in paralyzed individuals. The second is a scientific pursuit to understand how various neural substrates control voluntary movement. Specifically, Moran is interested in motor cortical representation of arm movements. His recent findings show that individual cells in primary motor cortex encode both the direction and speed of an impending movement. Combining the activity of a number (~100) of these motor cortical cells, a high-fidelity prediction of hand velocity is observed approximately a tenth of a second before it is performed by the limb.

Motor learning and neural plasticity is another research area of interest. All the motor cortical studies to date have used over-trained subjects during their recordings in order to average data over many recording sessions. However, with his recent advances in multi, single-unit recording methods, a naive subject can be recorded over a period of months to investigate what role motor cortex plays in motor learning. How motor cortical activity changes over multiple motor learning sessions is invaluable data for designing motor cortical controlled neuroprostheses.


Related Information


Related Links:
•Moran's Web page (http://biomed.wustl.edu/faculty/moran/)

Related Groups: