Vivek Srinivasan Receives Grant to Develop New Brain Imaging Technology

Vivek Srinivasan, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, received a 5 year R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke) to develop, validate, and apply new optical microscope technology for the study of subcortical pathology, non-invasively, in the living mouse brain.

Subcortical brain regions are critically important in memory, navigation, and other aspects of cognition. Subcortical pathology is a common feature in aging, Alzheimer’s disease, and vascular dementia but has been challenging to study in rodent models with micron resolution in vivo due to light scattering.

Rather than insert intrusive imaging probes that perturb physiology into the brain, the Srinivasan laboratory proposes to build a non-invasive optical microscope (using rarely-used long infrared wavelengths of light) to image white matter and hippocampus with micron-scale resolution more than 2 millimeters deep. If the project is successful, these techniques will have a widespread impact in preclinical experimental research in therapeutics and biomarker discovery, and will advance the study of white matter injury and subcortical dementia.

Collaborators on the project include Dr. Lee-Way Jin (Pathology) and Dr. John (Jack) Rutledge (Cardiovascular Medicine).