Transforming Clinical Brain Imaging to Protect the Neonatal Brain

1) Brief description of the context of the research including potential impact

Neonatal encephalopathy (NE), where the brain function of newborn babies is impaired, accounts for around a quarter of neonatal deaths worldwide and leaves many survivors with lifelong neurodevelopmental disability including cerebral palsy and seizures. Current approaches to monitoring and diagnosing NE have issues in terms of their ability to provide early assessment and to accurately assess injury severity and prognosticate outcomes.

This research aims to optimise an optical imaging platform combining broadband near-infrared spectroscopy (bNIRS) and diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) to monitor neonatal functional brain activity including tissue oxygenation, metabolism and blood flow. This has the potential to provide low-cost, objective, non-invasive and user-friendly brain monitoring to allow for early detection and assessment of NE and support of neurobehavioral interventions, ultimately leading to optimal developmental outcomes.

2) Aims and Objectives

The specific objectives are to:

- Optimise a neuroimaging platform, utilising bNIRS and DCS, to assess neuronal function, ensuring adaptability across diverse settings from neonatal intensive care units to outpatient clinics.

- Facilitate the use of the neuroimaging platform for effective application in infants, correlating localized cortical responses with abnormalities such as seizures and cerebral palsy.

- Implement machine learning and other computational techniques, to identify biomarkers of brain health from the measurements of functional brain activity obtained by the imaging platform.

3) Novelty of Research Methodology

The novelty of this research is in integrating optical neuroimaging (bNIRS and DCS) with clinical practice. There have been pre-clinical studies aimed at demonstrating the ability of these imaging modalities to provide insight into brain health following NE but little research in a clinical environment. The research also aims to identify novel biomarkers from the bNIRS and DCS data, using computational techniques to extract meaningful features that can provide clinical insight into injury severity and developmental outcomes.

4) Alignment to EPSRC's strategies and research areas

This research aligns with the EPSRC's Medical Imaging research area since it involves research into medical imaging instrumentation for the diagnosis and monitoring of NE.

5) Any companies or collaborators involved

There are no companies or external collaborators involved.