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Item Filmmaker-audience relationship in medical documentry(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2014) Pfau, Ingrid Grace; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Cindy StillwellAs a filmmaker, as well as a person with epilepsy I would like more people to know about epilepsy on an intimate level even if they do not have, or know anyone with epilepsy. In this paper I will compare the techniques used to explain a medical disorder in three different films. What can the filmmaker do to both capture the attention of their audience in order to explain what life can be like for someone with a particular disorder? I argue that, by blending a personal approach with the use of experimental techniques, a filmmaker can appeal to a wider audience by expressing the emotional or experiential reality of living with a given disorder. My own thesis film, Seizing the Unrecorded, shows my own journey to understand how my filmmaking and my epilepsy are connected. Using similar techniques to those found in essay and performative films, I go beyond simply explaining what epilepsy is scientifically, and engage the viewer in larger questions such as the concept of what is memory, what it means to be vulnerable, and the emotional as well as physical costs of epilepsy.Item Toward resolving the human neocortex epileptic proteome(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2013) Keren-Aviram, Gal; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Edward DratzEpilepsy is a common and often devastating neurological disorder, which is not well understood at the molecular level. Exactly why some brain regions produce epileptic discharges and others do not is not known. Patients who fail to respond to antiseizure medication can benefit from surgical removal of brain regions that produce epileptic activities. The tissue removed in these surgeries offers an invaluable resource to uncover the molecular and cellular basis of human epilepsy. Here, we report a proteomic study, as part of a Systems Biology of Epilepsy Project, which utilizes in vivo electrophysiologically-characterized human brain samples from the neocortex of 6 patients with refractory epilepsy, to determine whether there are common proteomic patterns in human brain regions that produce epileptic discharges. This study is unique in that comparison of protein expression was made within same patient, between nearby epileptic and non-epileptic (or less epileptic) brain regions, as defined by their interictal (between seizure) spike frequencies. Protein spots were resolved from three subcellular fractions, using two-dimensional differential-in-gel-electrophoresis, revealing 31 spots that changed significantly and were identified by liquid-chromatography tandem mass-spectrometry. Interestingly, glial fibrillary acidic protein was found to be consistently down regulated in high spiking brain tissue and glial fibrillary acidic protein levels showed strong negative correlation with spiking frequency. We next developed a two-step analysis method to select for frequently changing spots among the patients and identified 397 of those proteins. Spots of interest were clustered by protein expression patterns across all samples. This analysis predicted proteomic changes due to both histological differences and molecular pathways by examination of gene ontology clusters. Our experimental design and proteomic data analysis predicts novel glial and vascular changes and changes in cytoskeleton and neuronal projections that provide new insights into the structural and functional basis of neocortical epilepsy.Item Prediction of the initial antiepileptic drug for pediatric seizure patients : a multivariate analysis of historical, clinical and EEG data(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 1983) Hunt, Jeffrey Ivan