Els Fieremans
New York University, NY·Biomedical Engineering
The brain's white matter is its wiring: bundles of nerve fibers (axons) wrapped in myelin, a fatty insulation that speeds signals. This wiring is damaged in multiple sclerosis, traumatic brain injury, aging and dementia, but standard MRI sees it only as a blur at the millimeter scale.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
diffusion MRI
dMRI
microstructure MRI
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2029
What they work on
- 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.
- Test how sensitive and specific diffusion and T2-based myelin water MRI markers are to those cellular features, by matching multi-shell, multi-diffusion-time scans to microscopy in the splenium of the corpus callosum.
- Determine whether the same MRI markers detect treatment-induced remyelination in mice given clemastine, comparing MRI measures against electron microscopy and immunofluorescence definitions of repair.
- Build lifespan brain charts of quantitative diffusion MRI and mesoMRI white matter markers by unifying large public datasets with local clinical scans and electronic health records, and use them to define a brain microstructure age.
- Test whether brain microstructure age is sensitive to accelerated aging, neuro-inflammation and neurodegeneration along the Alzheimer's disease continuum, and how race/ethnicity, sex and lifestyle factors modify it.
- Validate the diffusion MRI markers in postmortem human brain specimens from controls and various dementia diagnoses using histopathology and proteomics, alongside longitudinal follow-up MRI.
More about the research
It cannot tell damage that can recover from damage that is permanent. Both projects here push MRI toward the cellular scale, using mathematical models of how water diffuses through tissue to infer features such as myelin loss, axon swelling and inflammation, and then checking those inferences against what the tissue actually looks like under a microscope.
Why it matters
Clinicians cannot currently tell, from a scan, whether damaged white matter is likely to recover. MRI markers validated against microscopy could allow earlier and more specific detection of demyelination, axon injury and inflammation in multiple sclerosis, traumatic brain injury, leukodystrophies and Alzheimer's disease, help select patients for trials of remyelinating or neuroprotective drugs, and provide a quantitative read-out of whether a treatment is working.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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).
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.
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
New York University: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 540 research doctorates a year.
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