Vibhor Krishna
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Medicine & Clinical Research
Essential tremor is a common neurological disorder that causes shaking and can lead to serious physical and emotional disability. Medicines often fail or cause side effects that limit dosing.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
essential tremor
focused ultrasound
ventral intermediate nucleus
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2028
What they work on
- Compare Vim ablation achieved with 3-D tractography-guided focused ultrasound against standard focused ultrasound in a controlled animal study, treating opposite brain hemispheres with each method.
- Test the safety, feasibility and early effectiveness of ablating 70% of the Vim with tractography guidance in a phase II human study, checking for side effects during surgery.
- Compare blinded video tremor ratings at baseline and 12 weeks with matched patients from earlier FDA-regulated trials of standard focused ultrasound, to estimate effect size.
- Assess whether conventional and non-conventional MRI during surgery can distinguish destroyed tissue from surrounding swelling and predict clinical outcomes.
More about the research
As a result, up to 20% of patients cannot control their symptoms and must consider a procedure. One option is focused ultrasound ablation (FUSA). It uses focused sound waves to destroy a small brain region called the ventral intermediate nucleus (Vim), which is linked to tremor, without incisions or anesthesia. The procedure works best when about 70% of the Vim is ablated without damaging nearby structures. This is hard to achieve at three stages: planning where the Vim lies, delivering the ablation accurately, and confirming it during surgery.
Why it matters
Patients with essential tremor that does not respond to medication could benefit from a more precise focused ultrasound procedure that needs no incisions or anesthesia. Better targeting with 3-D tractography, together with MRI monitoring during surgery, could improve how completely the tremor-related brain region is treated while avoiding damage to nearby areas.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Rosemary Lester-Smith
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine whether simultaneous neck-skin vibration sensor and head-mounted microphone recordings can tell apart breathing, voice box and vocal tract contributions to vibrato, a voice-modulating technique, in trained singers.
Kenneth B. Bader
University of Chicago, IL·Biomedical Engineering
Develop and characterize a tissue phantom, a tissue-like test material, containing an imprintable mechanophore that changes chemically under force, to record the brief stresses created by ultrasound microbubbles.
William A Grissom
Case Western Reserve University, OH·Biomedical Engineering
Develop fast intraoperative imaging on a low-field MRI scanner so the surgeon's image-guidance display updates in near real time as prostate tissue is resected.
The school
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 523 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.