Aditya Vedantam
Medical College of Wisconsin, WI·Medicine & Clinical Research
Degenerative cervical myelopathy (DCM) occurs when age-related wear in the neck squeezes the spinal cord. It is the most common cause of spinal cord dysfunction in older adults and an important source of disability.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
degenerative cervical myelopathy
spinal cord
diffusion weighted imaging
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2028
What they work on
- Determine whether multi-parametric MRI measures of axon injury (filtered diffusion weighted imaging, fDWI) and myelin loss (magnetization transfer imaging) correlate with function better than conventional MRI in degenerative cervical myelopathy.
- Use quantitative tests of motor, sensory and balance function to track recovery after DCM surgery objectively, and test whether they outperform standard symptom scores.
- Use post-surgical metal-suppression diffusion MRI (MSI-DWI), which works despite spinal hardware, to detect microstructural changes in the decompressed spinal cord associated with functional recovery.
More about the research
Surgeons plan operations using standard MRI scans, but these cannot tell which damage is permanent, and they often disagree with what doctors find on examination. Clinical assessment also relies on subjective symptom scores. As a result, neither approach predicts well who will improve after surgery.
Why it matters
Degenerative cervical myelopathy disables many older adults, and it is hard to predict who will benefit from surgery. Spinal cord MRI measures and objective function tests could help clinicians diagnose DCM more accurately, predict surgical outcomes, and monitor the spinal cord after surgery. This could improve decisions for patients and help reduce disability.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Kenneth Weber
Stanford University, CA·Neuroscience
Improve spinal cord functional MRI with a 64-channel head-neck coil, segment-based alignment of scans and surface electromyography (muscle recordings) to remove motion noise, while mapping how the cord encodes touch intensity in 30 volunteers.
Nian Wang
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Biomedical Engineering
Measure whole-brain myelin loss, iron imbalance and axon damage over time in cuprizone-treated Thy-1 YFP-16 mice, using quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) and diffusion MRI models (DTI, NODDI, DKI).
Brian D. Ross
University of Michigan, MI·Biomedical Engineering
Develop a multiparametric MRI signature of bone marrow disease in myelofibrosis mouse models by combining Dixon fat-fraction (PDFF), diffusion-weighted, and magnetization transfer imaging, which track marrow fat, cell density, and scar tissue.
The school
Medical College of Wisconsin: 17 labs on PI Pages, $360M a year on research, 44 research doctorates a year.
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