The overall goal of my work is to look at factors that help or harm the brain. So we
all have a brain we're all worried about what we can do best to improve our education or
improve our health. And so we do a whole range of imaging projects that look at factors that
help the brain such as exercise and cardiovascular fitness, what types of things we should do
to improve our brain and also how diseases affect the brain so we have a lot of projects
looking at Alzheimer's, Schizophrenia and HIV and understanding how those affect the brain too.
Some of the biggest questions of our time are how you treat disease. If you
see a terrible disease such as cancer or Alzheimer's disease, one of the ways of seeing whether
treatments are working, and imaging, which is an area that NIBIB invests a great deal
in, is really a good record of whether treatments are working. We're all familiar with going
to the doctor and being told we're getting better or getting worse but imaging really
gives you a physical picture of what's going on, so that's an exciting area to study.
There's a really new type of imaging called diffusion MRI and it basically looks at the
wiring of the brain. And so if you were flying over Los Angeles or over Bethesda you'd see
a whole lot of freeways and could probably guess what was going on down below. If you
were on the ground you could see the functions of the different freeways and the different
stores. This imaging takes us from a sort of bird's eye view right down to the ground
where you can see all the physical connections between the axons. And a lot of diseases disrupt
those connections. So, neurogenetic disorders of childhood there's often disruptions in
the migration fibers and we can see those. And diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, there's a loss of
connections. So we're often able to reconstruct which parts of the brain are going wrong and
look at some of the therapies that are able to help them.
All over the world people are scanning people's brains right now, so if we were to plan a
project that scanned thousands or tens of thousands of people it would be very costly.
So one of the ways we save money is we work with people around the world. And one project
we do called Enigma, we collect data from 125 sites from around the world and they've
been scanning people with schizophrenia, bipolar illness, or depression. We try and put together
a detailed picture of what those illnesses do to the brain. And so it's actually quite
an interesting project. All of these things were begun independently and all the data
is coming to our lab, we're able to say which parts of the brain are affected by the diseases
and which treatments help.
We're all pretty unique, so even if we have
an average picture of Alzheimer's disease, for example, it'll just show you the typical
way it spreads in the brain. Now that can be very useful because you can compare an
individual to the database. You can say, "Well, you seem to be doing pretty well because the
brain loss is going less rapidly than in the database of people the same age." So I think
the notion is that you can make comparative statements about a new person's scan based
on all the collected data from other people and that can be very reassuring.