Projects

Brain Light Laboratory

Our lab has ongoing enrollment for children who are typically developing, children with autism in their family, and children with a diagnosis of autism. If you are interested in having your child participate in any of our studies, please complete the Participant Sign-Up Form. If you have any questions, please call us at 314-747-5688 or email Brain Light Studies.

Childhood Development

An ongoing and long-term focus of our lab is to advance HD-DOT methods for evaluating brain-behavior relationships in infants, toddlers, and school-aged children who are typically developing, have a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or congenital heart disease, or who have an increased likelihood for developing ASD.

A neurodevelopmental disorder affecting 1/33 children in the general population, ASD is defined by social communication deficits plus repetitive behaviors and restricted interests. Neuroimaging methods, including both task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and task-free functional connectivity MRI, have demonstrated sensitivity to brain function that differentiates autistics from those without autism and that may track responses to interventions.

The MRI environment can prove intolerable for many children due to noise, claustrophobia, and the need to lie supine and still. HD-DOT provides a compelling alternative that overcomes the significant ergonomic limitations of fMRI and silently images brain function with a wearable cap in a naturalistic setting ideal for studies on awake and engaged infants and toddlers.

The Brain Light Lab investigates brain function throughout child development. Our studies focus on the following age groups:

Infants
Children ages 12 months to 3 years
School-aged children
Adolescents up to age 18

We are enrolling children who do not have autism, those who have autism in their family, those who are at an increased likelihood for developing autism, or those who have a diagnosis of autism. If you are interested in having your child participate in any of our studies, please complete our Participant Sign-Up Form. If you have any questions, please call call us at 314-747-5688 or email Brain Light Studies.

HD-DOT Methods Development

The loud and constraining nature of MRI-based neuroimaging severely limits studies on direct within-room social communication, on auditory processing and language generation, and presents an excessively challenging setting for sensitive participants, such as school-aged children and in particular young infants, toddlers, and those severely affected with autism spectrum disorder

NIRS-based methods measure variations in the time course of a signal between a source of safe near infrared light and a detector. When placed on the head, NIRS recovers underlying cerebral hemodynamic variations.

High-density diffuse optical tomography (HD-DOT) employs a high-density grid of sources and detectors to provide the overlapping measurements necessary to obtain image quality comparable to fMRI. Our lab has developed HD-DOT systems that can accurately map distributed brain activity within the outer ~1.5 cm of cortex in response to tasks, cortical resting state networks (RSN) during quiet rest and sleep, and distributed brain activity during movie watching.

HD-DOT has greater comfort than fMRI (participants sit upright in a comfortable chair), and has comparable temporal and spatial resolution to fMRI. Dynamic measures of brain function are thus accessible without requiring super-cooled magnets and the constraints of the MRI bore and head coils. HD-DOT is inherently portable and deployable in natural settings more amenable to assessing brain function in young children than other common functional brain imaging technologies.

In addition to further advancing the Continuous Wave HD-DOT systems within the lab, we are also developing Frequency Domain HD-DOT systems that incorporate additional phase information capable of further improving image quality obtainable with optical systems.

For more on NIRS, please see this article in ScienceDaily.

Congenital Heart Disease (CHD)

The Brain Light Laboratory has funded studies focusing on CHD in infants. Neuromonitoring of brain health in critically ill children with CHD is severely limited by a lack of useful bedside neuromonitors that provide clinically useful sensitivity and specificity. With HD-DOT, we aim to evaluate brain health in infants with CHD at the bedside. This means a less invasive, more comfortable experience where we can perform neuromonitoring of functional connectivity in peri-operative and critical care settings.

Of two and a half million survivors of CHD living in the United States, more than two-thirds live with moderate to severe neurological disabilities. Newborns with CHD require lifesaving surgeries and interventions such as extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) immediately after birth. Because of frequent hemodynamic perturbations and impaired cerebral autoregulation before, during, and after these interventions, recovery from prenatal injury is often disrupted.