Canadian Research Chair in Vascular Optical Imaging

血管疾病和认知障碍之间，以及心血管危险因素和脑白质病变之间的相关性已经确立。除了这些相关性之外，了解大脑在这些疾病中是如何恶化的，或者心血管因素是否导致了这种恶化，是我研究的一个核心问题，对于帮助临床医生开发新的治疗方法至关重要，这样心脏和大脑都能在衰老中得到保护。本研究项目的主要目标是在全脑和高分辨率下，研究与心血管疾病相关的脑微血管特性变化对脑功能和结构的影响。这将通过发展最先进的光学成像技术与生物物理模型相结合来实现，这些模型旨在解释和预测这些变化将如何影响解剖学和功能方面的临床成像测量。然后，我们的预测将使用相同的模型转化为临床应用。

Correlations have been established between vascular disorders and cognitive impairments, and also between cardiovascular risk factors and brain white matter lesions. Understanding beyond those correlations how the brain deteriorates in these diseases or if cardiovascular factors contribute to this deterioration is a central question of my research and is essential to help clinicians develop new therapies so that both heart and mind are preserved with aging. The main goal of this research program is to investigate, in the whole brain and at very high resolution, the role of changes in brain microvasculature properties associated with cardiovascular diseases on brain function and structure. This will be achieved by developing state-of-the-art optical imaging techniques combined with biophysical models that aim to explain and predict how these changes will impact clinical imaging measures both in terms of anatomy and function. Our predictions will then be translated to clinical applications using the same models.