Kenneth Weber
Stanford University, CA·Neuroscience
The spinal cord relays touch and movement signals between the body and the brain, but it is hard to see in living people. When nerves in the neck are pinched or the cord itself is compressed, people develop pain, numbness, hand weakness and clumsiness.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
spinal cord fMRI
functional magnetic resonance imaging
neuroimaging
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through May 2028
What they work on
- Improve spinal cord functional MRI with a 64-channel head-neck coil, segment-based alignment of scans and surface electromyography (muscle recordings) to remove motion noise, while mapping how the cord encodes touch intensity in 30 volunteers.
- Map spinal cord activity during electrical stimulation of the thumb, middle and little fingers (C6–C8 dermatomes) in 120 healthy adults, testing left-right and sex differences, and use machine learning to predict the stimulated site.
- Compare spinal cord sensory activity in 40 patients with C7 cervical radiculopathy (pinched nerve root) and matched controls to test the diagnostic value of fMRI sensory markers.
- Characterize brain, spinal cord and forearm muscle changes behind hand weakness in degenerative cervical myelopathy using simultaneous brain-cord fMRI, structural imaging and fat-water and diffusion MRI of muscle.
- Build machine-learning neuromuscular signatures that predict grip strength and dexterity, and test whether pre-surgery signatures predict hand recovery one year after surgery.
More about the research
Doctors have limited tools to pinpoint the injury or predict who will recover. This work uses magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), including functional MRI (fMRI) of the spinal cord, which tracks nerve activity through blood flow changes, to map how the cord processes sensation and controls the hand in health and in disease.
Why it matters
These imaging markers could help clinicians locate nerve root injury in cervical radiculopathy more accurately than current skin-sensation charts. For people with degenerative cervical myelopathy, signatures that predict surgical response could support earlier surgery in patients likely to recover. They could also spare unlikely responders the risks of an operation, and they may reveal the factors behind recovery to improve treatment.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Aditya Vedantam
Medical College of Wisconsin, WI·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine whether multi-parametric MRI measures of axon injury (filtered diffusion weighted imaging, fDWI) and myelin loss (magnetization transfer imaging) correlate with function better than conventional MRI in degenerative cervical myelopathy.
Sabhya Rana
Ohio State University, OH·Neuroscience·Early-career
Develop an effective transcutaneous spinal direct current stimulation protocol that increases phrenic nerve activation after cervical spinal cord injury in rats, using controlled neurophysiological nerve recordings.
Lee Miller
Northwestern University, IL·Biomedical Engineering
Build decoders that predict intended muscle activity (EMG) from primary motor cortex spiking recorded in humans with high-level spinal cord injury, trained with EMG, hand posture and force data from able-bodied people doing the same actions.
The school
Stanford University: 87 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 739 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.