[Brainmap]: Pratik Mukherjee, M.D., Ph.D. - Advances in Imaging White Matter Microstructure and the Macroscale Connectome with Applications to Human Brain Development and Brain Injury

Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - 12:00 to 13:00
149 13th Street (Building 149), Room 2204

Title: Advances in Imaging White Matter Microstructure and the Macroscale Connectome with Applications to Human Brain Development and Brain Injury

Pratik Mukherjee, M.D., Ph.D.
Professor of Radiology and Bioengineering
University of California, San Francisco

Abstract:

Diffusion MRI has made enormous strides over the past three decades and is now the primary method to probe the living human brain across orders of magnitude of scale: from tissue microarchitecture to the whole-brain structural connectome.  Greatly improved gradient strength and speed, innovative pulse sequences, combined with novel biophysical modeling of diffusion MRI data, now enable the noninvasive measurement of biologically meaningful microstructural parameters such as axonal and dendritic density and fiber orientation dispersion.  In this lecture, I review the development of multivariate analysis methods that exploit the correlation of these microstructural metrics across space and across individuals, leveraging the larger diffusion MRI datasets that are becoming increasingly available in both healthy and disease populations.  In this vein, I present clinical applications to human brain development, to neurodevelopmental disorders such as sensory processing dysfunction, and to concussions and mild traumatic brain injury.  Finally, I discuss two recent advances in white matter connectomics.  First, I focus on mapping the anatomic embedding of the whole-brain structural network, which identifies special zones of vulnerability that are of particular importance in many white matter diseases across the lifespan, from premature infants to the elderly.  Second, I review progress in applying spectral graph theory to decompose the human macroscale connectome into its fundamental “eigenmodes”.  These structural eigenmodes provide a robust and parsimonious basis set with which to describe functional connectivity networks from fMRI and MEG, as well as to characterize the unique perturbations of brain network organization and activity caused by diverse neurological and psychiatric disorders.

About the Speaker: 

Pratik Mukherjee MD PhD is Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).  He is a practicing clinical attending neuroradiologist at UCSF and also serves as the Director of the Center for Imaging of Neurodegenerative Disease (CIND) based at the San Francisco VA Medical Center. Dr. Mukherjee received his undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Psychology from Yale University, his PhD in Computational Neuroscience from Rockefeller University, and his MD from Cornell University.  He completed his residency and fellowship training at Washington University in St. Louis, while conducting postdoctoral research there in Dr. Marc Raichle’s Neuroimaging Laboratory. 

Dr. Mukherjee’s research has encompassed technical development and neuroscience and clinical applications of advanced imaging methods for mapping microstructure, function and connectivity in the human brain, with the goal of developing novel imaging biomarkers for neurological and psychiatric diseases that can be used in a Precision Medicine framework for diagnosis, prognosis and prediction of treatment response.  Recent work includes machine learning analysis of advanced diffusion MRI, resting state fMRI and MEG data to investigate microstructure and connectivity in human brain development, neurodevelopmental disorders and traumatic brain injury (TBI). He serves as a PI and the Imaging Core leader for the Transforming Research and Clinical Knowledge in TBI (TRACK-TBI) multi-center population-based observational study, funded by an NIH U01 grant, as well as the PI at UCSF for the GE-NFL Advanced MRI of Traumatic Brain Injury multicenter investigation. He is a PI on two NIH Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neuro-technologies (BRAIN) Initiative multi-center projects to produce transformational advances in MR technology to bring noninvasive human cortical imaging to the micro-scale.  Dr. Mukherjee also serves as the PI of a California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine (CIAPM) grant to apply deep learning to accelerate the imaging diagnosis of neurological emergencies such as TBI, stroke and aneurysmal hemorrhage.