[Semester Project]

Background:

Strokes, resulting from the interruption of the blood supply to the brain, affect million of people worldwide every year. They are a major cause of disabilities, with about 80% of stroke survivors being affected by motor deficits [1]. The rehabilitation of stroke patients thus represents a challenge for our society. While stroke lesions occur in the brain, they also impact the entire motor hierarchy, as neural pathways descend from the brain to the spinal cord to reach skeletal muscles. In particular, recent work has highlighted the remodeling of spinal cord circuits following stroke [2], suggesting that the spinal cord could offer promising avenues to improve the existing therapies.

Project description:

Here, we propose to build on these recent results to investigate how the spinal cord is impacted by brain lesions resulting from stroke. To this end, we have acquired a cohort of stroke patients for which spinal cord diffusion MRI has been acquired at multiple time points post stroke (3 weeks, 3 months, 1 year). The project will involve the following steps:

• Process diffusion images (possible relying on existing pipelines, see https://github.com/sct-pipeline/levin-stroke)
• Identify changes in white matter integrity (using an atlas-based approach)
• Link the identified changes to clinical indicators and brain lesion morphology (e.g., location, volume, …)
• Possibly evaluate longitudinal changes to probe the link with recovery

Required skills:

• Applicants are required to be comfortable with programming
• Previous knowledge on MRI processing and analysis is a plus

Contact: Nawal Kinany (nawal.kinany@epfl.ch) and Ilaria Ricchi (ilaria.ricchi@epfl.ch).

References

[1] Langhorne, P., Coupar, F. and Pollock, A. (2009) ‘Motor recovery after stroke: a systematic review.’, Lancet neurology.

[2] Karbasforoushan, H., Cohen-Adad, J. and Dewald, J. P. A. (2019) ‘Brainstem and spinal cord MRI identifies altered sensorimotor pathways post-stroke’, Nature Communications.