Irving J. Bigio
Boston University, MA·Biomedical Engineering
Nerve fibers in the brain and spinal cord are wrapped in myelin, a fatty insulating sheath that lets electrical signals travel quickly. When myelin breaks down, as happens in multiple sclerosis, stroke, Alzheimer's disease and normal aging, thinking and movement can suffer.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Neuroscience
Physics
- Topics
myelin
quantitative birefringence microscopy
qBRM
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Nov 2026
What they work on
- Automate a birefringence microscope with computer-controlled motorized polarizers and stage positioning, and use parallel computing, to rapidly image and render brain sections up to 40 × 40 mm.
- Validate quantitative birefringence microscopy (qBRM) measures of myelin density and orientation against the FluoroMyelin Red myelin stain and label-free spectral confocal reflectance (SCoRe) microscopy in the same tissue sections.
- Use qBRM to quantify myelin in young and old rhesus monkeys with cognitive testing, comparing brain tissue between animals that differ in age and memory performance.
- Apply qBRM to old monkeys with motor-cortex injury or cognitive impairment that were treated with extracellular vesicles from mesenchymal stem cells, to measure myelin status in these treatment models.
More about the research
Measuring that damage across a whole brain is hard. Electron microscopy shows myelin in fine detail but cannot be scaled to an entire monkey or human brain. Chemical stains are hard to quantify, and newer label-free optical methods are slow and expensive for large tissue sections.
Why it matters
No low-cost, rapid way currently exists to map myelin damage at high resolution across a whole primate brain. A validated polarized-light method could help researchers measure the myelin breakdown involved in multiple sclerosis, stroke, Alzheimer's disease and age-related cognitive decline. It could also help them judge whether experimental treatments, such as stem-cell-derived vesicles, preserve or repair myelin in animal models.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Els Fieremans
New York University, NY·Biomedical Engineering
Generate a three-dimensional ultrastructural map of white matter injury in the mouse cuprizone demyelination model using large-scale electron microscopy and quantitative immunofluorescence, counting myelinated and unmyelinated axons, axonal beading and glial remodeling.
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.
Peter T. So
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA·Biomedical Engineering
Design optical compression schemes for differentiable microscopy by training front-end optics and the decompression algorithm together as one neural-network auto-encoder.
The school
Boston University: 26 labs on PI Pages, $784M a year on research, 630 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.