Jennifer A Mcnab
Stanford University, CA·Biomedical Engineering
For people whose epilepsy does not respond to medication, surgery can stop seizures, but only if surgeons know exactly where the seizures begin. That region is called the seizure onset zone.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
diffusion MRI
dMRI
cortical fiber mapping
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2028
What they work on
- Develop and validate diffusion MRI cortical fiber mapping, which infers tissue microstructure from how water moves in the brain, to detect the disrupted cortical architecture inside focal cortical dysplasias, using 3D histology as ground truth.
- Test whether diffusion MRI cortical fiber mapping can detect focal cortical dysplasias, brain malformations that cause seizures, in patients with medication-resistant epilepsy whose clinical MRI shows no lesion.
- Test whether diffusion tractography, which traces nerve fiber pathways, combined with functional connectivity MRI can predict probable cortical nodes of the seizure propagation network.
- Test whether MRI connectivity measures predict the timing and spatial spread of epileptiform activity recorded between intracranial stereo-EEG electrodes, validated with high-density scalp EEG.
More about the research
Roughly 400,000 people in the US have medication-resistant epilepsy with no visible abnormality on clinical brain MRI. For them, finding the seizure onset zone means implanting many depth electrodes into the brain, guided only by a coarse map from scalp electrodes, and the electrodes often miss the target. Brain imaging that could reveal the hidden lesion would make these surgeries far more likely to succeed.
Why it matters
If these imaging methods work, many of the roughly 400,000 US patients with medication-resistant epilepsy and normal-looking clinical MRIs could have a probable lesion identified before surgery. That could make electrode implantation more targeted, improve confidence in locating the seizure onset zone, and open a potentially curative surgical option to patients who would otherwise not be candidates.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Adam W Anderson
Vanderbilt University, TN·Biomedical Engineering
Develop and validate improved methods for identifying and characterizing multiple fiber populations within a single imaging voxel, benchmarking them against current leading algorithms using confocal microscopy of squirrel monkey brain as ground truth.
Nishant Sinha
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Build scalable pipelines that automatically aggregate and jointly analyze structural MRI, intracranial EEG (IEEG) and clinical data from multiple epilepsy centers, so analyses generalize across sites.
Jiangyang Zhang
New York University, NY·Biomedical Engineering
Develop diffusion MRI methods that measure tissue microstructure and water exchange between inside and outside of cells in a neonatal mouse model of hypoxic ischemic injury, and validate them against histology.
The school
Stanford University: 87 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 739 research doctorates a year.
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