Adam W Anderson
Vanderbilt University, TN·Biomedical Engineering
Water molecules inside the brain do not move randomly in every direction; along a nerve fiber bundle they drift more easily lengthwise than across. Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging exploits this to map the brain's wiring and to infer the fine structure of tissue without surgery or injections, which supports everything from wiring diagrams of the brain to stroke diagnosis and surgical planning.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Neuroscience
Biophysics
- Topics
diffusion MRI
diffusion weighted imaging
fiber tractography
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2030
What they work on
- Develop and validate improved methods for identifying and characterizing multiple fiber populations within a single imaging voxel, benchmarking them against current leading algorithms using confocal microscopy of squirrel monkey brain as ground truth.
- Test whether diffusion MRI can resolve fiber bundles crossing at angles below the current 40–60 degree limit, since this limit biases fiber tractography and blocks fiber-specific microstructure measurement.
- Measure the reproducibility of fiber-specific diffusion properties along individual pathways and across repeated scans, and relate them to tissue microstructure measured by optical microscopy to test assumptions in common analysis packages.
- Quantify how much fiber-specific diffusion properties vary between individuals by extending the squirrel monkey brain atlas and building a comparable human atlas, testing whether variability is lower than for conventional measures.
More about the research
Free software for this analysis has spread faster than the work needed to check whether its answers are correct. Different packages make different simplifying shortcuts: some discard information in the signal that could describe tissue in detail, while many microstructure methods ignore fiber dispersion, the fact that fibers within a bundle fan out rather than lying perfectly parallel. This project aims to make measurements within a single image voxel more reliable by improving both the ability to resolve fiber directions and the sensitivity to properties of individual fiber populations.
Why it matters
Diffusion MRI is already used clinically for stroke detection and surgical planning and in research on brain connectivity, but its measurements are hard to tie to actual tissue structure. Validating these measurements against light microscopy and reducing variability between scans and between people could make the technique more sensitive to white matter injury and more specific about what changed, helping clinicians and researchers distinguish injury, recovery and normal aging in the brain's wiring.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jiangyang Zhang
New York University, NY·Biomedical Engineering
Develop diffusion MRI methods that measure tissue microstructure and water exchange between inside and outside of cells in a neonatal mouse model of hypoxic ischemic injury, and validate them against histology.
Jennifer A Mcnab
Stanford University, CA·Biomedical Engineering
Develop and validate diffusion MRI cortical fiber mapping, which infers tissue microstructure from how water moves in the brain, to detect the disrupted cortical architecture inside focal cortical dysplasias, using 3D histology as ground truth.
Els Fieremans
New York University, NY·Biomedical Engineering
Generate a three-dimensional ultrastructural map of white matter injury in the mouse cuprizone demyelination model using large-scale electron microscopy and quantitative immunofluorescence, counting myelinated and unmyelinated axons, axonal beading and glial remodeling.
The school
Vanderbilt University: 22 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 494 research doctorates a year.
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