Predicting Outcomes in Pediatric Hemorrhagic Stroke with Personalized Connectomics


Principal Investigator

Research Coordinator


About Project 2

Connectomics is the study of the brain’s structural and functional connections. The brain is organized with functions located in certain areas. When a hemorrhagic stroke, or bleeding, occurs in a particular area of the brain, the associated function may be lost. For example, bleeding into the language area can cause difficulty in speaking. There are some common trends, but the organization for each person is very different. This makes it difficult to predict the effects of a hemorrhagic stroke for an individual, especially when only the general location of the abnormal blood vessels that caused the bleeding is known. New types of imaging can help us to understand the organization of a person's brain. Project 2, Predicting Outcomes in Pediatric Hemorrhagic Stroke with Personalized Connectomics, will use resting-state fMRI to gather information about pediatric patients’ functional networks, or brain organization. The aim of this study is to determine how an individualized understanding of those networks can help predict the effects of hemorrhagic stroke in children and guide surgical planning to improve treatment outcomes and recovery.

 MRI Scan of Left Occipital Hemorrhage

 

Figure 1

 Atlas of Resting State Networks (RSN)

 

Figure 2

 Legend for Atlas of RSN

Figure 2

The hemorrhage demonstrated in Figure 1 is expected to disrupt the Visual RSN as shown in Figure 2.

RSN Atlas Image Source: Yeo BT, Krienen FM, Sepulcre J, Sabuncu MR, Lashkari D, Hollinshead M, Roffman JL, Smoller JW, Zöllei L, Polimeni JR, Fischl B, Liu H, Buckner RL. The organization of the human cerebral cortex estimated by intrinsic functional connectivity. J Neurophysiol. 2011 Sep;106(3):1125-65. doi: 10.1152/jn.00338.2011. Epub 2011 Jun 8. PMID: 21653723; PMCID: PMC3174820.