Monitoring functional recovery in acquired brain injury – Standardization of fMRI data acquisition and analysis

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a noninvasive technology for examining functional activity in the brain. It is widely used in research, but is not yet part of routine patient care in clinics. To date, most of the fMRI applications collect imaging data at a single time point. This has limited the potential of the method as a diagnostic tool to monitor changes over time, which is needed especially for the evaluation of rehabilitation and pharmaceutics treatments effect of patients with acquired brain injury such as traumatic brain injury and stroke. Such multiple time studies are technically challenging because they request following of standardized procedures, in terms of both data acquisition and analysis, to minimize possible changes induced by inconsistent operations. Our proposed research will develop optimized procedures to acquire and analyze fMRI data consistently for long-term brain function monitoring. Through repeated MRI tests, brain functional changes will be linked with rehabilitation outcomes during recovery.

Faculty Supervisor:

Ryan D’Arcy;Xiaowei Song

Student:

Partner:

Philips Healthcare (Markham, ON)

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

Simon Fraser University

Program: