High-tech research wins Ph.D. degree for disabled student

Press, 3 May 1984, Page 21

High-tech research wins Ph.D. degree for disabled student

By

ERIC BEARDSLEY,

information

officer, University of Canterbury

Richard Fright has an inventive mind, the partial use of his arms, and enormous courage. They are enough for a determined young man to chart new courses in the complex high technology world of biomedical engineering.' Today he will be awarded a doctorate by the University of Canterbury at one of the annual graduation ceremonies in the Town Hall; in September he will take up a post-doctoral fellowship awarded by the University Grants Committee to continue research at Ham and in Christchurch hospitals. He will use techniques developed over the last decade by a research group in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department under Professor Richard Bates. For his doctoral research, Richard Fright, who is 26, improved the display of information contained in electro-encephalogram (E.E.G.) records of the electrical activity of the human brain, as well as making original contributions in two exciting fields, one of which has the potential to transform optical astronomy in the future.

What can one do with this sort of expertise in New Zealand? Professor Bates, who has long advocated better opportunities at home for brilliant students in these fields, believes Richard Fright and others like him have the ability to add new dimensions to medical diagnosis and treatment and to win an international reputation in a field in which developments are fast and furious.

There is certainly evidence that the research group at Ham is making an impact internationally. Papers published in scientific journals have resulted in Professor Bates being invited to address international conferences of engineering scientists and medical specialists. But Richard Fright cannot accompany him. Nine years ago he was severely injured in a diving accident and is now classified as a C4/5 quadraplegic. That means he is confined to a wheelchair and has only the partial use of his arms. But that movement is crucial to him for it enables him to “tame” computers. In spite of an enormous hurdle, Richard Fright was determined to succeed in the field of electrical engineering. He gained a B.E. with first-class honours in 1980 and since then has been undertaking research with Professor Bates’s team and assisting researchers at Christchurch and the Princess Margaret Hospitals. To do this work he has developed skills in computer programming, electronic design, the direction of microwave and optical experiments and system design, and interfacing measurement and com-

putational apparatus. His disability, he says, has forced him to learn how to persuade others to do physical tests for him and to direct their efforts.

He has certainly learned it well. His associates, from sometimes cantankerous professors or medical specialists to raw or research students, technicians to tea dispensers, not only respect him, but hold him in deep affection. His research has impressed hospital staff, who are now accustomed to engineering research students from the Bates team collaborating in medical problems. For part of his doctoral research he worked in the Neurology Department at Christchurch Hospital developing computer techniques to investigate the electrical activity of the brain and nervous-muscular system. The aim was to study epilepsy, tumours, and other brain disorders as well as to investigate sensory pathways into the brain.

More development is needed before clinical trials can begin, but his improved display of information obtained from E.E.G. scans is impressive. He devised and wrote all the necessary software and also proposed new display equipment in the department.

With a final-year engineering student, Ng Wei Yong, Richard Fright also began work last year on a computer technique for detecting neuro-muscular disorders. The staff of the department are

anxious for both investigations to continue. So is Professor Bates. The work makes use of several image-processing techniques he has been developing for several years.

The hospital’s Intensive Care Unit is also expected to benefit from Richard Fright’s work. He is at present attempting to establish a central computer system to monitor the vital signs of critically ill people, such as arterial and cen-tral-venous blood pressures, electrical activity of the brain and heart and breathing. For his Ph.D., Richard Fright undertook to investigate several related problems. In addition to the display of E.E.G. information he worked at Ilam on laboratory simulations of new astronomical imaging techniques. That work, Professor Bates says, was an ideal piece of preliminary research training; and it convinced him that he had a brilliant research colleague with whom to reckon. A doctorate requires an original contribution to knowledge and Richard Fright certainly made that contribution, though it would require a book to describe it. He devised a practical solution of what is known as the Fourier phase problem, not the same phase problem that exists in X-ray crystallography, even though that too is based on Fourier theory. Though the work is exotic it has a high profile because it has applications in branches of image processing on which the next generation of giant optical telescopes will depend if they are going to be able to form images. As a result it captured wide scientific attention. Indeed, the laboratories at Ham in which this work is undertaken are now believed to rank among the leaders in the world.

Richard Fright says a large number of people have helped him through his university career, but he has also been something of an inspiration. Eight years ago he was the only disabled student at Ham. Now there are eight on the campus and they have been helped a great deal by his example.

»his undergraduate years, students went out of their way to assist. Lecture notes were photocopied for him and there was no dearth of writers to assist him during examinations. He also acknowledges with considerable gratitude the assistance of the Accident Compensation Corporation with transport to and from Ham and with the provision of a special typewriter.