Neuroimaging of Movement Disorders

As a postbaccalaureate research fellow in the Hallet lab at the NIH, I studied the pathophysiology of movement disorders. While this work included a substantial amount of human neurophysiology (TMS, EMG, etc), I primarily developed an expertise in neuroimaging (structural and functional MRI). Below are brief descriptions of the projects I worked on.

In vivo assessment of neurodegeneration in Spinocerebellar Ataxia type 7

Spinocerebellar ataxia type 7 (SCA7) is a hereditary movement disorder characterized by progressive degeneration of the brainstem and cerebellum. While we know from post-mortem neuropathology that SCA7 is associated with severe atrophy of these areas along with several cellular abnormalities throughout the brain, we sought a way to track the progression of these structural pathologies in vivo. However, the severe nature of these abnormalities confounds the use of common structural MRI techniques such as voxel-based morphometry and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI).

Silvina Horovitz and I addressed these problems by applying cutting-edge developments in DTI methodology. Namely, we used a dual-compartment DTI model to regress out the confounding effects of increased extracellular free water present in