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损害之间也建立了相关性。除了这些相关性之外，了解这些疾病中大脑是如何退化的，或者心血管因素是否会导致这种退化，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，以便心脏和智力随着年龄的增长而得到保护至关重要。该研究计划的主要目标是在整个大脑中，以非常高的分辨率，研究与心血管疾病相关的脑微血管特性变化对大脑功能和结构的作用。这将通过开发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在解剖和功能方面影响临床成像措施。然后，我们的预测将被转化为使用相同模型的临床应用。

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.