Fields of Research

Neurology and neuromuscular diseases
Central nervous system
Geriatrics and gerontology
Computer vision
Preventative health care
Cognitive neuroscience
Health services and systems
Health management
Applications in health
Health promotion
Radiology and organ imaging
Aged health care
Digital health
Neurosciences
Implementation science and evaluation
Cardiology (incl. cardiovascular diseases)
Epidemiology
Health informatics and information systems
Medical biotechnology
Artificial life and complex adaptive systems
Peripheral nervous system
Clinical sciences
Diagnostic radiography
Evolutionary computation
Oral and maxillofacial surgery
Sensory systems
People with disability
Primary health care
Behavioural neuroscience
Artificial intelligence
Cognition
Speech recognition
Human-computer interaction
Exercise physiology
Physiotherapy
Clinical neuropsychology
Health surveillance
Epidemiological modelling
Sensor technology (incl. chemical aspects)
Analytical biochemistry
Behavioural epidemiology
Virtual and mixed reality
Satisfiability and optimisation
Intensive care
Deep learning
Computational neuroscience (incl. mathematical neuroscience and theoretical neuroscience)
Motor control

Research Objectives

Diagnosis of human diseases and conditions
Clinical health
Treatment of human diseases and conditions
Artificial intelligence
Preventive medicine
Health related to ageing
Prevention of human diseases and conditions
Health education and promotion
Mental health
Behaviour and health
Efficacy of medications
Evaluation of health outcomes
Evaluation of health and support services
Allied health therapies (excl. mental health services)
Human-computer interaction
Health policy evaluation
Telehealth
Outpatient care
Languages and linguistics
Expanding knowledge in the health sciences
Palliative care
Migrant health
Health related to specific ethnic groups
Injury prevention and control
Public health (excl. specific population health)
Exercise
Other health
Primary care
Health inequalities
Health system performance (incl. effectiveness of programs)
Expanding knowledge in psychology
Expanding knowledge in the information and computing sciences
Information systems, technologies and services

Career Best Publications

Exercise and dementia prevention; Practical Neurology
How to use pen and paper tasks to aid tremor diagnosis in the clinic; Practical Neurology
Practical Ultrasound: An Illustrated Guide; CRC Press
The discerning eye of computer vision: can it measure Parkinson's finger tap bradykinesia?; Journal of The Neurological Sciences

Research Publications

'Interview with Dr Jane Alty, Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre' interview by Neil Broomfield
'Second Interview with Dr Jane Alty, Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre' interview by Neil Broomfield
Geste antagoniste effects on motor performance in dystonia—a kinematic study; Movement Disorders Clinical Practice
A history of dystonia: Ancient to modern; Movement Disorders Clinical Practice
A new evolutionary algorithm-based home monitoring device for Parkinson's dyskinesia; Journal of Medical Systems
A patient with neuro-Behçet's disease is successfully treated with etanercept: Further evidence for the value of TNFα blockade; Clinical Neurology and Neurosurgery
A practical guide to the differential diagnosis of tremor; Postgraduate Medical Journal
A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of levetiracetam for dyskinesia in Parkinson's disease; Movement Disorders
A smartphone camera reveals an 'invisible' Parkinsonian tremor: A potential pre-motor biomarker?; Journal of Neurology
Accuracy of smartphone video for contactless measurement of hand tremor frequency; Movement Disorders Clinical Practice
Alzheimer's in women, and the role of 'cognitive reserve'
An innovative personalised management program for older adults with Parkinson's disease: new concepts and future directions; Journal of Personalized Medicine
Application of classification for figure copying test in Parkinson's disease diagnosis by using cartesian genetic programming; GECCO '19 Companion
Applications of artificial intelligence to aid early detection of dementia: a scoping review on current capabilities and future directions; Journal of Biomedical Informatics
Are tomorrow’s doctors prepared to prevent dementia? A cross-sectional study of Tasmanian medical students’ knowledge of dementia risk factors; Journal of Clinical Neuroscience
Association Between Components of Cognitive Reserve and Serum BDNF in Healthy Older Adults; Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience
Automated analysis of propositional idea density in older adults; Cortex
Challenges of incorporating digital health technology outcomes in a clinical trial: experiences from PD STAT; Journal of Parkinson's Disease
Classification and characterisation of movement patterns during levodopa therapy for parkinson's disease; 2014 Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO’14)
Clinical examination in Parkinson's disease; World Congress in Geriatric Medicine - Back to the roots
Clinical Ultrasound: Case Reviews; Anshan Ltd
Clinicians' implicit and explicit attitudes about the legitimacy of functional neurological disorders correlate with referral decisions; British Journal of Health Psychology
Cluster-like headache secondary to trigeminal meningioma; Neuroscience
Cognitive deficits in Parkinson’s disease: current perspectives; Journal of Parkinsonism and Restless Legs Syndrome
Cognitive impairment in Parkinson’s disease; Postgraduate Medical Journal
Cognitive reserve in the baseline data of Tasmanian Healthy Brain Project: No effect of age or interaction with gender; The fourth annual NHMRC National Institute for Dementia Research (NNIDR) Australian Dementia Forum
Computational approaches for understanding the diagnosis and treatment of Parkinson's disease; IET Systems Biology
Computer vision of smartphone video has potential to detect functional tremor; Journal of the Neurological Sciences
Cost effectiveness analysis of a device to monitor levodopa-induced dyskinesia in Parkinson’s patients; ISPOR 18th Annual European Congress
Dementia diagnosis in a day: the ISLAND Clinic
Diagnosis of Parkinson's disease; Coalface Geriatrics Conference
Diagnostic accuracy of the overlapping infinity loops, wire cube, and clock drawing tests in subjective cognitive decline, mild cognitive impairment and dementia; Geriatrics
Diagnostic accuracy of the overlapping infinity loops, wire cube, and clock drawing tests in subjective cognitive impairment, mild cognitive impairment and dementia; Australian Dementia Research Forum 2022 (ADFR)
Differences in clinical manifestations of late onset, compared to earlier onset essential tremor: a scoping review; Journal of the neurological sciences
Evolutionary Design of Reduced Precision Levodopa-Induced Dyskinesia Classifiers; Genetic Programming (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13223)
Exercise and dementia prevention; Practical Neurology
Exploring diagnostic models of Parkinson’s disease with multi-objective regression; 2016 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI)
Functional Neurological Disorder is a Feminist issue; Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry
Get Parkinson’s medications on time: the Leeds QI project; Age and Ageing
Going through directional changes: evolving human movement classifiers using an event based encoding; GECCO '17: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion
Hand tremor detection in videos with cluttered background using neural network based approaches; Health Information Science and Systems
Health at the writing desk of John Ruskin: a study of handwriting and illness; Medical Humanities
How to use pen and paper tasks to aid tremor diagnosis in the clinic; Practical Neurology
Increased age and higher levels of cognitive reserve are associated with lower serum BDNF levels in healthy older adults; Australian Dementia Forum 2021
Increased knowledge of adult-onset dystonia amongst medical students via brief video education: a systematic review and cohort study; Geriatrics
Inferring the long duration response to levodopa in Parkinson's disease; Parkinsonism and Related Disorders
Island Study Linking Aging and Neurodegenerative Disease (ISLAND) targeting dementia risk reduction: protocol for a prospective web-based cohort study; JMIR Research Protocols
Isolated REM sleep behaviour disorder: current diagnostic procedures and emerging new technologies; Journal of Neurology
John Ruskin’s relapsing encephalopathy; Brain
Lesson of the month 2: Transient reversible amnesia in multiple sclerosis; Clinical Medicine
Longitudinal study of levodopa in Parkinson's disease: effects of the advanced disease phase; Movement Disorders
Longitudinal study of the levodopa motor response in Parkinson's disease: relationship between cognitive decline and motor function; Movement Disorders
Management of secondary poor response to botulinum toxin in cervical dystonia: a multicenter audit; Movement Disorders Clinical Practice
Moving towards intelligent telemedicine: Computer vision measurement of human movement; Computers in Biology and Medicine
Multi-system complications of hypothermia: a case of recurrent episodic hypothermia with a review of the pathophysiology of hypothermia; Postgraduate Medical Journal
Multiple plasmacytoma with multiple neurological presentations: A difficult case; Practical Neurology
Multiple system atrophy mimicked by multi-organ pathology; Practical Neurology
Neurological and neurosurgical complications of alcohol; ABC in Alcohol
New horizons in late-onset essential tremor: a pre-cognitive biomarker of dementia?; Age and Ageing
Objective assessment of bradykinesia in Parkinson's disease using evolutionary algorithms: Clinical validation; Translational Neurodegeneration
Objective evaluation of Bradykinesia in Parkinson’s disease using evolutionary algorithms; Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2018)
Of Mice and Pose: 2D Mouse Pose Estimation from Unlabelled Video Frames using Synthetic Data; CV4Animals: Computer Vision for Animal Behavior Tracking and Modeling
Oromandibular dystonia: a diagnosis not to miss; British Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
Palliative care for Parkinson's disease: a summary of the evidence and future directions; Palliative Medicine
Parkinson’s disease diagnosis using convolutional neural networks and figure-copying tasks; Neural Computing and Applications
Patients’ and carers’ experience of dementia and memory services: Early findings from the Australian Dementia Network (ADNeT) Registry; Australian Dementia Research Forum 2022 (ADFR)
Physical activity for dementia risk reduction - not as easy as it sounds; 2021 Australian Dementia Forum
Poster - The island study linking ageing and neurodegenerative disease (ISLAND): a longitudinal public health research program targeting dementia risk reduction; 2020 Alzheimer's Association International Conference
Practical Ultrasound: An Illustrated Guide; Hodder Education Publishers
Practical Ultrasound: An Illustrated Guide; CRC Press
Pulmonary artery dissection: An emerging cardiovascular complication in surviving patients with chronic pulmonary hypertension; Heart
Real-time automated detection of older adults’ hand gestures in home and clinical settings; Neural Computing and Applications
REM sleep behaviour disorder: the importance of early identification; British Journal of General Practice
Seeing the unseen: could Eulerian video magnification aid clinician detection of subclinical Parkinson’s tremor?; Journal of Clinical Neuroscience
Sex-specific protective effects of cognitive reserve on age-related cognitive decline: A 5-Year prospective cohort study; Neurology
Significant cognitive decline in Parkinson's disease exacerbates the reliance on visual feedback during upper limb reaches; Neuropsychologia
Study of levodopa response in Parkinson's disease: observations on rates of motor progression; Movement Disorders
Studying at university in later life slows cognitive decline: A long-term prospective study; Alzheimer's & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions
Supervised classification of bradykinesia in Parkinson’s disease from smartphone videos; Artificial Intelligence in Medicine
Systemic lupus erythematosus-induced intracranial hypertension: rare but important; Practical Neurology
Tassie researchers at forefront of early warning test for dementia - Newspaper interview by Sue Bailey
TasTest: moving towards a digital screening test for pre-clinical Alzheimer’s disease; Biomarkers
The discerning eye of computer vision: can it measure Parkinson's finger tap bradykinesia?; Journal of The Neurological Sciences
The ISLAND clinic: first year outcomes of a new state-wide ‘one-stop’ cognitive clinic in Tasmania; ADRF - Australian Dementia Research Forum
The Island Study Linking Ageing and Neurodegenerative Disease (ISLAND): A longitudinal public health research program targeting dementia risk reduction
The TAS Test project: a prospective longitudinal validation of new online motor-cognitive tests to detect preclinical Alzheimer’s disease and estimate 5-year risks of cognitive decline and dementia; BMC Neurology
Time series clustering to examine presence of decrement in Parkinson’s finger-tapping bradykinesia; 42nd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC)
To the emergency room and back again: circular healthcare pathways for acute functional neurological disorders; Journal of the Neurological Sciences
Tremors: a practical approach; Coalface Geriatrics Conference
Tremulous Hands
Truth, hope and the disclosure of a dementia diagnosis: a scoping review of the ethical considerations from the perspective of the person, carer and clinician; Dementia
Using epigenetic networks for the analysis of movement associatedwith levodopa therapy for Parkinson’s disease; Biosystems
What is it like to live with a functional movement disorder? An interpretative phenomenological analysis of illness experiences from symptom onset to post-diagnosis; British Journal of Health Psychology
What to do when people with Parkinson’s disease cannot take their usual oral medications; Practical Neurology
What type of tremor did the medieval 'Tremulous Hand of Worcester' have?; Brain
When myopathy breaks the rules: A late-onset distal presentation; BMJ Case Reports
Which figure copy test is more sensitive for cognitive impairment in Parkinson's disease: Wire cube or interlocking pentagons?; Clinical Neurology and Neurosurgery
Widening the phenotype of FXTAS in females: Spasmodic dysphonia in two patients

Research Projects

A new model of shared care across Geriatric Medicine and General Surgery for older Tasmanians.; Royal Hobart Hospital Research Foundation (RHHRF)
An Integrated Method for the Assessment and Monitoring of Dementia and Cognitive Impairment: The Cognition - Optimised, Digitised, And Harmonised (CODH) platform; Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF)
Blood-based biomarkers for neurodegeneration dementia; Royal Hobart Hospital Research Foundation (RHHRF)
Detecting dementia risk by wearing a watch: Evaluation of sleep/wake patterns to identify REM sleep behaviour disorder (RBD) in Tasmania; Royal Hobart Hospital Research Foundation (RHHRF)
Development and Validation of a contactless tool for measuring patient tremor; National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)
Development of a non-invasive screening test to detect risk of Alzheimer's disease pathology; Royal Hobart Hospital Research Foundation (RHHRF)
Exploring clinic manifestations of late-onset Essential Tremor: a pre-cognitive biomarker of dementia? ; Royal Hobart Hospital Research Foundation (RHHRF)
HDAC6 inhibition to rescue axon degeneration in ALS; FightMND (FMND)
Identifying older adults in Tasmania with REM Sleep Behaviour Disorder(RBD): the crucial first step towards reducing their high risk of neurodegeneration.; Royal Hobart Hospital Research Foundation (RHHRF)
The future in our hands: Screening for preclinical Alzheimer's disease by analysing hand movements; National Health & Medical Research Council (NHMRC)
Sniffing out Dementia: Olfactory dysfunction in an at risk group of older Tasmanians

Research Candidate Supervision