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Brain Imaging Technology
Team goal
Study brain development in children through neuroimaging to create models for healthy development so doctors will be able to detect pathologies earlier in a person's life. Improve interpretation of the massive amounts of data generated by MRI scans and evaluate the therapeutic effects of new drugs.
Faculty
Orly Alter, Ph.D.
Miriah Meyer, Ph.D.
Team description
How do you know if you're looking at something unhealthy, if you don't know what healthy looks like? This burning question drives research by USTAR professor Guido Gerig to study the development of brains in children from infancy to four years old.
Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), Dr. Gerig is creating detailed models of healthy development. These models include brain volume, size of different brain structures, brain connectivity, and growth rates.
The goal is to use these models of healthy development to help doctors uncover problems much earlier than is currently possible. The ability to start therapy in infants as young as one year may lead to significantly improved outcomes.
It's up to innovators like Dr. Gerig, Tolga Tasdizen and Tom Fletcher to make better sense of MRI data and create tools, such as software systems, to extract more useful information from the data. These quantitative assessments of brain diseases over time will serve to improve diagnostic techniques, as well as monitoring the success of new treatments.
Developing new drugs, particularly for brain problems like schizophrenia or depression, is a costly endeavor. Dr. Gerig is pioneering new techniques for proving the direct biological changes in the brain that result from a person taking a certain drug. Dr. Gerig is developing new tools to quantify structural changes in the brains of patients and evaluate eventual therapeutic effects of the drug treatment.
Dr. Guido Gerig was recruited from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to the University of Utah with USTAR funds. At UNC, was Taylor Grandy Professor of Computer Science and Psychiatry and Director of the Neuroimage Analysis Laboratory where he developed a reputation as an international leader in medical imaging technology development. At the University of Utah, Dr. Gerig is a Professor of Computer Science within the School of Computing and will now direct the new Center for Neuroimage Analysis. He also joins the U's teams at the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute and the Utah Brain Institute. Past participation of Dr. Gerig in collaborative NIH research projects generated $1 million per year on average. He will bring with him nearly $2 million in research funding to the University of Utah.
Read the November 2009 article on the Imaging Technology team's latest successes.
The team has established the Utah Center for Neuroimage Analysis (UCNIA) (www.ucnia.org) which provides service, support and advanced research for quantitative image analysis associated with challenging biological and clinical applications.
Read the profiles and web pages of Gerig, Tolga Tasdizen and Tom Fletcher.