Prematurity & Perinatal Brain Injury

At Western University, London, Canada and Children's Hospital, I have scanned approximately 100 neonates and infants born prematurely, with perinatal brain injuries and/or complications during birth. The goal of this project was to detect alterations of functional brain organization before delays in development become behaviorally apparent. This is important as it is currently difficult to predict neurodevelopmental outcome at the time of discharge from the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Functional MRI can be utilized to provide independent information that may allow better prediction of long-term outcome.

As part of the Cusack Lab's Collaborative Health Research Project, this has also led to substantial methods development, both for MRI image acquisition and analysis - see the Publications and fMRI Methods page for more details and published findings.

Additionally, I have collaborated with Paediatric Neurology at Children's Hospital, LHSC on a project using fMRI and DTI to study functional and structural development in healthy children (7-18 years) compared to patients with previous intraventricular-hemorrhage, and on a clinical case study and a matched control group (7-8 years) examining functional and structural connectivity in mirror reading and writing. The results of this collaboration were published in Neuropsychologia.

Project with Sandrine De Ribeaupierre, Narayan Prasad, Elizabeth Roach-Fox, Ellen Vriezen, and Leire Zubiaurre-Elorza.