Faculty Research Laboratories

Steven M. Barlow, Ph.D., Director
Communication Neuroscience Laboratories - CNL

The newly opened Communication Neuroscience Laboratories (CNL September /2001), directed by Dr. Barlow, occupy 1500 square feet on the 4th floor of Haworth Hall, adjacent to the Life Span Institute in the Dole Human Development Center at the University of Kansas. The CNL includes a distributed cluster of recording laboratories at 3 off-site facilities including two neonatal intensive care units (Neonatology at KUMC, Neonatology at Stormont-Vail Medical Center, and one movement disorders unit (Neurology at KUMC). These laboratories permit the study of electrophysiology, biomechanics, aerodynamics, and psychophysics of orofacial, vocal tract, and limb muscle systems. The CNL also includes an electronics lab, a dedicated data server, and a research computing cluster. Each lab is currently equipped with several Dell Pentium 4 MS XP Pro workstations networked (100T) under the DOLENET Novell WWW and Linux Data Servers. Some of these labs are equipped with specially designed Faraday and/or IAC recording suites for high fidelity electrophysiological recordings, sinks, gas hood and evacuation for ethylene oxide instrument sterilization, and electrode preparation and cold sterilization area.

Front-End Data Acquisition and Stimulus Control: A 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 microprocessor complete with 100 GB of hard disk, 1 GB RAM, a 16-channel 16-bit A/D converter (National Instruments E-series, 330 KHz max aggregate sampling), 2 channel 16 bit D/A conversion for stimulus waveform generation (125 KHz output/channel), PVGA graphics is available for dedicated use in force dynamics and reflex modulation experiments. Software routines generated by our computer engineering staff (written in Visual C, C++, MS Assembler, Visual Basic, and VI's - virtual instruments - written in LabView) provide for versatile data acquisition, stimulus control, signal processing. A full range of mathematical, statistical and graphics tools are available on lab workstations (MATLAB 7.0, MINITAB v.13, and SIGMAPLOT 2003).

Servo Mechanical Stimulator and Analog Signal Conditioning: The laboratories are equipped with a new line of servo stimulators including two 50 mm linear motors capable of 10 N of continuous force (FORCE/Position feedback), a 24 mm servo-controlled linear motor, and three ACTIFIER II stimulator/suck units for developmental studies. The labs are equipped with wall-mounted articulating motor arms for precise positioning, servo controllers, amplifiers and signal conditioning for electromyography (20 channels), bridge amplifiers (30 channels), conditioning amplifiers (10 channels), waveform discriminator/threshold detectors (4 units), force and movement transduction and calibration stages (wide selection of custom designed instruments), 8-channel rack monitor storage O'scope, two 4-channel storage O'scopes, a pair of 2-channel digital O'scopes with FFT analyzers, instrument racks and MAC patch panels are presently available for exclusive use by the PI, collaborators, and students.

Office: CNL includes sufficient office space to support 12 undergraduate and graduate research assistants.


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