Peiying Liu
University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD·Biomedical Engineering
Damage to the brain's tiniest blood vessels, called small-vessel disease, is a major cause of memory and thinking problems in older adults. It is the second leading cause of dementia, and up to 80% of Alzheimer's patients also show vascular damage.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
cerebrovascular reactivity
vascular cognitive impairment
small vessel disease
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jan 2031
What they work on
- Develop normalized cerebrovascular reactivity (nCVR) MRI, which uses oxygen-breathing responses to correct CO2-breathing responses. Test whether it is more reproducible and better at detecting reduced reactivity than standard BOLD-based CVR.
- Validate nCVR maps against heavily averaged arterial spin labeling (ASL) blood-flow CVR. Test whether both show similar reactivity across tissue and vessel regions.
- Compare nCVR with standard BOLD-CVR for detecting vascular cognitive impairment in MCI patients with high or low vascular risk and in cognitively normal controls.
- Develop a gas-free CVR MRI technique from resting-state scans and brief breathing modulations, with BOLD and blood-flow readouts, in healthy volunteers.
- Identify how CO2 and caffeine levels drive normal variation in gas-free CVR. Then test its diagnostic sensitivity in MCI patients against cerebrospinal fluid amyloid-beta 42.
More about the research
Yet doctors lack good tests for it. A promising measure is cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR), how much brain blood vessels can widen when stimulated, for example by breathing carbon dioxide (CO2). This work develops better magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) methods for measuring CVR. The goal is to make it a practical biomarker for vascular cognitive impairment (VCI). One project makes the measurement more accurate. The other makes it easier for patients.
Why it matters
Vascular cognitive impairment is hard to diagnose precisely and objectively, and it lacks the biomarkers available for Alzheimer's disease. These MRI methods could give clinicians a more accurate and more comfortable way to measure blood-vessel health in the brain. That may help diagnose vascular dementia in older adults and monitor how well treatments work, possibly alongside other biomarkers.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Hanzhang Lu
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Biomedical Engineering
Develop VICTR MRI, a non-contrast method that measures venous transit time from changes in T1 relaxation, in six major brain veins including the superior sagittal sinus and internal jugular veins.
Brian Gold
University of Kentucky, KY·Neuroscience
Test whether low blood-brain barrier water exchange, measured with the new DW-ASL MRI sequence, predicts growth of white matter hyperintensities over about 3 years in healthy older adults.
Tamer Ibrahim
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Biomedical Engineering
Measure small vessel shape, cerebrovascular reactivity (how brain vessels respond to demand) and cerebrospinal fluid flow with 7T MRI in 60 older adults without dementia, comparing amyloid-positive and amyloid-negative people.
The school
University of Maryland, Baltimore: 23 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 79 research doctorates a year.
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