In the dean's courtyard at the School of Medicine, student Anil Menon set up a monitor and a peculiar machine with a long gray arm. Visitors could move the arm and manipulate objects that appeared on the screen inside a virtual room. The arm froze in buzzing complaint when it struck immovable objects like walls.

He also had a virtual rat dissection, but his laptop wasn't fast enough to run the simulation. It's all part of Menon's work -- developing a virtual-reality device for surgical training.

Ted Leng (left) shares a laugh with Leandro Ariel Espinosa, also a medical student, at last week's Student Research Symposium. Leng's research focuses on helping the recently blind regain sight. He worked on the project with a wide array of Stanford graduate students, including physicists and chemical engineers.

"The applications of my research include software that physicians could use to practice and teach laparoscopic surgeries," Menon said. "This simulator can create a virtual world free of gravity for simulation of space station experiments; it's a juncture of space, medicine and engineering."

Menon was one of 52 students presenting their research Friday at the 19th annual Stanford Medical Student Research Symposium. He wasn't the only one whose work seemed more like science fiction than just plain science. Other students, for example, are creating devices that help the recently blind see again.

Seeing-eye technology

Ted Leng's project focuses on improving how prosthetic devices interface with the retina. Until now, researchers have sent signals from the prosthetic to the retina in a haphazard way using microelectrode arrays that spray small shocks of electricity into the retina. Leng, however, was able to coax individual retina neurons to grow out to the arrays.

The difference between the old method and Leng's is like the difference between a shotgun and a rifle: just zapping the retina makes the patient see fuzzy shapes; but if scientists zap individual neurons, patients have a better chance of regaining clear vision.

"The lab I'm working in is really what Stanford is all about," Leng said. "I work with graduate students in applied physics as well as chemical engineering. We're trying to use available knowledge and apply it toward real problems affecting patients right now."

Building a better test

While Jiang-Ti Kong's research on Toxoplasma gondi is less high-tech, it's just as exciting. Toxoplasma is a strange crescent-shaped parasite. For part of its life cycle, it refuses to live anywhere except the small intestine of cats — though it doesn't care if the cat's a tiger or a tabby.

For the majority of its life, however, toxoplasma is indiscriminant about where it lives. Any animal will do, be it sheep, cow, pig or human.

Jiang-Ti Kong was one of 52 presenters at the School of Medicine's annual Student Research Symposium. Her research is geared toward finding an easier way to test for toxoplasma, a widely distributed and difficult-to-test-for parasite that can lead to serious illness in AIDS patients.

To catch toxoplasma, the host must be in contact with cat feces or uncooked meat carrying the parasite. The Centers for Disease Control recently estimated that 24 percent of Americans are toxoplasma carriers. Up to a billion people may be infected worldwide.

The good news is that toxoplasma is neutralized by the body in two or three months and becomes a benign hitchhiker. The bad news is that toxoplasma can cause brain abscesses in 25 percent to 50 percent of infected AIDS patients if left untreated. It can also lead to severe birth defects in babies, and blindness in some adults. Most of the parasites isolated from infected hosts belong to one of three strains. Kong and her team believe not all toxoplasma strains are created equal. In mice, the different strains have different effects.

It's uncertain whether the same is true for people because it's extremely difficult to obtain toxoplasma parasites from those infected, but unfortunately, it is required for all current tests. Kong has been working on a method that will overcome this limitation.

Her test appears to work almost as well as existing methods but without the need to obtain any parasites. If her team is able to tease out the secrets of toxoplasma strains and what they do to the human body, doctors may be able to decide when to aggressively treat AIDS patients or how to advise pregnant women with recent infections. Kong hopes it will be used clinically in five years.

"Existing tests are effective as long as we can get parasites out of the patient, but it's difficult to get them unless the patient is ragingly sick. You have to do a vitreal tap [taking eye fluid] on somebody with toxoplasma blindness, or a spinal tap on someone with central nervous symptoms. With our method, all you need is to take some blood."

Other award winners

The Stanford Alumni Association presented six awards to student researchers this year. Ross Bright, MD, associate dean for alumni affairs, presented the awards.

For oral presentations, Leng won first place. Brian Milligan and Jennifer McIntire received second-place awards. Milligan's research focused on the cellular regulation of central nervous system development; McIntire helped identify a gene family that may lead to carriers developing asthma.

For poster presentations, Alyssa Brewer won first place for work studying how brains of the colorblind differ from those with normal eyesight. Menon won second place along with Naveen Yalamanchi, whose project explored how to surgically place living cartilage into the finger joints of arthritis sufferers.