Meeting of the Minds: Carnegie Mellon Undergraduate Research Symposium

May 2009

Statistics Competition
First Place: MIchael Albrecht (Statistics, Class of 2009), Vinith Annam (Economics and Statistics, Class of 2010), and Nicole Mattison (Economics and Statistics, Class of 2009). "Brain Activity of a Sedated Cat."

Abstract: We are interested in determining the neural effects of an external visual stimulus on a sedated domestic cat. In this study, researchers make a cat look at a television screen with bars moving across the display, while filming the cat's brain to look for changes. However, the largest changes in the video are not caused by neural activity, but rather by the direct effects of respiration and circulation, which interfere the cat's brain activity. Our objective is to remove these extraneous effects from selected parts of the original data, so that others can study the relationship between the external visual stimulus and the "corrected" data. Our approach uses Fourier analysis to isolate and filter out the periodic effects of respiration and circulation.