Around The Globe

Like all sciences, neuroscience is collaborative. New Zealand researchers make an important contribution to the global effort to better understand the brain, and to develop better treatments for neurological disorders.

Here is some of the traumatic brain injury (TBI) research taking place globally that we are keeping an eye on.

(Please note the Neurological Foundation doesn’t contribute funding to any of these projects):

USA

Massachusetts General Hospital

• There’s an abundance of clinical information available within electronic health records that could aid in medical research. However, assessing these large data sets manually is extremely time-consuming and crucial
  information can be missed. Researchers from the Department of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital have employed a machine learning-based method to identify all patients with epilepsy, from all forms of electronic health records, resulting in more complete databases for researchers to analyse. This will enable large-scale research to be conducted, leading to greater clinical relevance in the findings.
  
  

Canada

University of Toronto

• Deep brain stimulation is commonly used for the management of Parkinson’s disease. There are potentially significant benefits with this treatment – although it requires numerous clinical appointments. Researchers at the University of Toronto have developed a technique using a specific form of MRI scan and machine learning algorithms to predict the optimal settings for each patient by analysing brain response patterns which indicate optimal stimulation. This both increases the benefit of treatment for the individual and reduces the time before treatment can be accessed.

 

France

Grenoble Institute of Neurosciences

• Determining the right level of treatment intensity for people who have suffered a severe traumatic brain injury remains a challenging decision in the early stages of recovery. Currently, CT images are taken, and manually quantified to determine the level of treatment required. This is both time-consuming and prone to human error. Researchers from Grenoble Institute of Neurosciences have developed an AI-based tool to analyse brain lesions using CT scans, to predict the optimal treatment intensity in the first week of recovery, resulting in the best possible outcomes for the patient.

 

Taiwan

National Yang Chiao Tung University and China Medical University

• Whole-brain radiation is an effective treatment to control cancer metastases in the brain. But to preserve cognitive function it needs to avoid the hippocampal region of the brain, which is exceptionally complex and time-consuming to plan. Researchers from the National Yang Chiao Tung University and China Medical University have developed an artificial intelligence-assisted method to generate clinically reliable plans for whole-brain radiation in less than 10 minutes – drastically reducing the wait time for this lifeextending treatment.
  
  

References

USA
A discriminative event-based model for subtype diagnosis of sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease using brain MRI 
https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/alz.12939 

Canada
Predicting optimal deep brain stimulation parameters for Parkinson’s disease using functional MRI and machine learning
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23311-9 

France
Prediction of therapeutic intensity level from automatic multiclass segmentation of traumatic brain injury lesions on CT-scans
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-46945-9 

Taiwan
Identification of patients with epilepsy using automated electronic health records phenotyping
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/epi.17589