My name is
David Le and I am currently a Senior studying Bioengineering. My project is on
investigating the muscle architecture surrounding myofascial trigger points in
people suffering from chronic neck pain in an attempt to understand more about
the causes and effects of these painful nodules using ultrasound
characterization.
I have known
since early on in going to George Mason that I wanted to be involved in
research, but only recently have come to know more about the professors and
work being done at the institution. I intend to further my studies through
graduate school so the URSP experience is extremely valuable for my future
plans.
I became
interested in this project due to Dr. Sikdar, my advisor, telling me that the
Biomedical Imaging Lab was planning to begin more study of myofascial trigger
points and gave me the opportunity to help set the foundational work for future
studies at the lab. There has been previous research done at GMU, but there is
now renewed interest in pursuing
Every
week, Dr. Gerber from GMU and Dr. Shah from the NIH, who are collaborators in
this project, join us and help with different aspects such as identification of
the trigger points for subjects with chronic neck pain. Currently, we are
researching and developing new methods from which we can possibly test on these
subjects. From there we plan analyze the ultrasound images that we record and
aim to characterize the muscle architecture.
The one
thing I have learned so far is how powerful ultrasound is as a tool in medical
imaging. There is plenty of potential available in this method even though it
has is not as flashy MRI or CT scans due to its simplicity. From that
simplicity, we can apply different tools to learn more from muscle than just
what the picture tells us. I am thoroughly fascinated with this project and
excited to not only work on it this semester but hopefully for the rest of my
time at George Mason.
