Epilepsy study uses Penn IDs

Your face may be more useful than you think. Neurology Professor John Detre recently solicited a random group of hundreds of Penn students, asking permission to use their PennCard ID photos in a research project. The photos will be shown to epilepsy patients to study memory functions, according to Detre. One of the most common neurological disorders, epilepsy affects about 1 percent of people. The majority of epileptic seizures can be controlled with medications, but a reasonable percentage cannot, making surgery to remove part of the brain necessary to control seizures. It is this group of patients on which the study is focusing. The most common place where seizures originate is in the temporal lobes of the brain, located on the bottom sides of the brain. The temporal lobe is involved in "some useful things like memory and language," Detre explained. According to Detre, one of the most important things to do before an operation is to predict what type of memory problems patients might have after surgery. "The real goal of the imaging research is to see whether we can visualize what parts of the brain are involved in memory function," Detre continued. Researchers will use that information to predict whether "the surgery would result in memory deficits." The hippocampus is the area of the brain responsible for memory. In most people, the left hippocampus responds to language, and the right to visual spatial, or non-semantic, information. People's faces are commonly used as non-verbal spatial stimuli, Detre explained, because faces are complicated things that people do not remember by using words. The "idea behind using these faces is to try and selectively look at right temporal lobe memory function." This is where Detre and the PennCard photos come into the picture. The majority of these photos are uniform poses, and all are in color. Previous studies have been done using black and white photos, but the results were inconclusive. Detre wanted to use color faces, hoping that these images would be more engaging and "recruit more memory activation." Detre wrote a request for photos to Information Systems and Computing, who deferred it to the Office of the Registrar for consideration. Confidentiality and consent requirements had to be considered to ensure that the study would "not be violating any students' rights" under federal regulations, University Registrar Ronald Sanders said. All PennCard photos are stored in a database in the registrar's office and are accessible by University offices for University business, according to Sanders. Since the study is not included in this distinction, Sanders decided to send a consent request to students before using photos. Out of the 3,000 random students who received a request, 345 students have given permission to use their photos as of last week. Once the group of students was known, their student ID numbers were sent to ISC, and a team headed by Information Technology Technical Director Jim Choate had to write a program to extract these particular faces. The research team headed by Detre, including a physicist, neuropsychologist, physicians and other researchers here at Penn, have just received a grant of over $1 million from the National Institutes of Health for five years. Previously, they had been funded by the Epilepsy Foundation of America.