Developmental Neuroscience
Functional MRI
I use auditory stimulation paradigms, resting state fMRI and DWI to assess how auditory brain function and network connectivity develops over the first years of life, in healthy infants and those with perinatal brain injury or neurodevelopmental disorders. Detecting abnormalities in cortical sound processing early - before language delays become behaviorally apparent - is paving the way to earlier diagnosis and interventions.
Click here for more details on my fMRI work on neonates with perinatal brain injury, and here for my fMRI work in toddlers, children and adolescents with autism.
I currently co-direct an NIH funded study investigating “Auditory precursors of language delay in toddlers with autism spectrum disorders”, and have been a collaborator on the SDSU Toddler MRI Study since 2016.
Upper row: auditory activation in a 3-month old; visual resting state component in a 9-month old and DTI in a 3-month old scanned on the 3T Siemens Prisma at the Robarts Research Institute (right). Bottom row: MRI setup used for neonates at Children's Hospital, LHSC.
Cranial Ultrasound
MRI is the gold-standard to assess brain structure but it is expensive and not portable. We have used affordable ultrasound technology to image brain structure in low resource settings and are developing methods to automize image processing and analysis.
Project with Rhodri Cusack, David Clay, Bobby Stojanoski, Stephen Rulisa and Aggrey Wasunna.
Electroencephalography (EEG)
I have also been involved in a collaboration using EEG to study how infants process basic auditory information, how they store sounds in short term memory and how they learn the statistics of their auditory environment. Developing robust paradigms that can be used to assess brain function after perinatal brain injury or premature birth was one of the main goals of this project. We have also used these paradigms to test affordable equipment that can be used at the bedside in low resource settings.
Project with Rhodri Cusack, Bobby Stojanoski, Dan Cameron, Michelle Tran, Stephen Rulisa and Aggrey Wasunna.