Jerzy P Szaflarski
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL·Neuroscience
Brain disorders that change how people think, speak, or control seizures are hard to see from the outside, and much of the work here is about making hidden brain changes measurable. Two projects share that goal: one develops a magnetic resonance imaging method to detect inflammation in the brains of people with epilepsy, and the other uses brain imaging plus language testing to predict how well stroke survivors with aphasia will be able to communicate.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Psychology
- Topics
temporal lobe epilepsy
neuroinflammation
magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2030
What they work on
- Quantify brain temperature patterns using magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging and thermometry, which reads temperature from the shift between creatine and water signals, and compare treatment-resistant temporal lobe epilepsy, controlled epilepsy, and healthy controls.
- Assess whether focal brain temperature measurements are stable over 12 weeks in patients with treatment-resistant and controlled temporal lobe epilepsy, establishing whether the signal is reliable enough to track over time.
- Test whether temperature elevations correspond to real inflammation by comparing them with inflammatory markers in temporal lobe tissue removed during epilepsy surgery and with blood markers of inflammation.
- Determine how semantics, phonology, and sentence planning deficits each contribute to spoken functional communication in a large sample of people with chronic post-stroke aphasia.
- Identify lesion locations associated with functional communication deficits using lesion-symptom mapping with multimodal neuroimaging and machine learning.
- Build and evaluate a model that predicts chronic language sub-system and functional communication deficits from routine clinical brain scans taken 48–72 hours after stroke.
More about the research
The epilepsy project targets neuroinflammation — a low-grade immune reaction in brain tissue involving activated glial (support) cells, thought to both cause and result from seizures. Inflamed tissue runs slightly warmer, and the proposal exploits that. Magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging and thermometry (MRSI-t) measures temperature non-invasively by comparing two peaks in the chemical signal from brain tissue: creatine, whose position is stable, and water, whose position shifts with temperature. The current alternative, specialized positron emission tomography, is expensive, technically fragile and available in few centers. Participants with treatment-resistant temporal lobe epilepsy, with seizures controlled by medication, and healthy controls will be scanned to map temperature across the whole brain in many small voxels; scans will be repeated at 12 weeks to test stability. Temperature elevations will then be compared against inflammation markers measured in temporal lobe tissue removed during epilepsy surgery and in blood, to test whether the imaging signal really reflects inflammation. The expected payoff is a practical marker of treatment resistance that could be used before surgery and to follow response to therapy.
Why it matters
For epilepsy, a widely available MRI-based measure of brain inflammation could help identify why some patients stop responding to medication, guide evaluation before surgery, and track whether treatments are working. For stroke survivors with aphasia, a prediction model built from scans taken within days of the stroke could tell patients and clinicians early how communication is likely to recover, informing rehabilitation planning.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Christine K. Fox
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine which inflammatory signaling pathways acute seizures activate after pediatric stroke, using banked blood from children in the VIPS I cohort and validating preliminary findings in an independent cohort.
Leonardo F Bonilha
University of South Carolina-Columbia, SC·Neuroscience
Test whether adding anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to audio-visual speech therapy improves naming more than sham stimulation, in a randomized Phase II/III trial of people with chronic Broca's aphasia.
William Graves
Rutgers University-Newark, NJ·Psychology
Develop neural network accounts of post-stroke dyslexias by lesioning a model that links spelling, sound and meaning, then re-training it to simulate damage and recovery in groups and individual patients.
The school
University of Alabama at Birmingham: 45 labs on PI Pages, $866M a year on research, 166 research doctorates a year.
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