Paul Regier
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Neuroscience·Early-career
Overdoses from opioids have reached record levels, and relapse remains a major danger for people in recovery. Problems with executive function, the mental skills for planning, focus and self-control, are linked to worse treatment outcomes such as more drug use and skipped medication.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
opioid use disorder
addiction
relapse
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2028
What they work on
- Compare executive-function scores and prefrontal cortex activity, measured with fNIRS (light-based brain imaging), between people with opioid use disorder and healthy controls.
- Test how prefrontal brain data and co-occurring factors such as depression, anxiety and past abuse relate to executive function and clinical outcomes in OUD, using step-wise regression.
- Test whether deep learning on multi-task spatiotemporal fNIRS data can distinguish people with OUD from healthy controls.
- Determine whether deep learning on fNIRS brain data can classify people with OUD into better or worse executive-function and drug-use outcome groups, and whether adding co-occurring factors improves classification.
More about the research
But people with opioid use disorder (OUD) often also face depression, anxiety or past abuse and neglect, so it is hard to tell what causes these thinking problems. This project combines brain imaging, cognitive testing and deep learning to sort out these factors and predict who is at risk.
Why it matters
Opioid-related deaths are at record levels, and relapse to high-potency opioids is a central danger in recovery. A portable brain imaging tool combined with deep learning may help identify people at higher risk of relapse and the factors driving it. This could point clinicians toward treatment approaches that reduce relapse and improve medication adherence for people with opioid use disorder.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Corey Bohil
Lawrence Technological University, MI·Psychology
Identify brain activity markers of uncertainty with fNIRS, which tracks blood oxygen in the cortex, to improve understanding of decision making.
Anna Konova
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Neuroscience
Test whether experimentally induced craving shifts the brain's drug-specific value signals in 89 patients with opioid use disorder, using a value-based choice task during fMRI with craving and control sessions.
Ece Demir-Lira
University of Iowa, IA·Psychology
Test a serial mediation model in which gestational age at birth affects children's number skills through their verbal skills and then through the brain systems for numbers, measured with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS).
The school
University of Pennsylvania: 90 labs on PI Pages, $2.2B a year on research, 750 research doctorates a year.
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