Post Doctoral Fellow-MSH
Post Doctoral Fellow-MSH
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Job Description
Details of Research Project:
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an effective treatment for severe and chronic neuropsychiatric symptoms that are poorly controlled with medication or psychotherapy. Despite individual successes the precision of targeting and optimizing stimulation parameter selection and long-term management remains a hit-or-miss endeavor. Our group recently developed a connectome-based precise targeting approach for subcallosal cingulate DBS in depression and it improves response rates from 43% to 80%. However therapeutic pathways for the anterior limb of the internal capsule (ALIC) DBS in OCD are still unknown.
Another important challenge toward precision DBS is the heterogeneity of psychiatric disorders. A growing body of evidence has found the usage of multimodal neuroimaging to identify disease subtypes and predict optimal treatment assignments such as medication or psychotherapy. However no known biomarkers exist to determine the patient population most likely to benefit from DBS.
In this project we will generate a connectome atlas of ALIC that specifies which white matter pathways to target with DBS to treat OCD effectively. We will map patient-specific tractography activation pathways with ultra-high field 7T DWI data which will be correlated with clinical improvement. In addition we will evaluate the multimodal neuroimaging dataset (structural and functional neuroimaging) of depression and OCD to establish patient selection imaging biomarkers for psychiatric DBS treatment.
Responsibilities
Technical Duties: (include any protocols)
- Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) data preprocessing and analysis
- Diffusion tractography analysis of various psychiatric disorders including OCD and Depression.
- Resting-state functional data preprocessing and analysis
- Statistical analysis on multimodal imaging dataset
- Neural computation modeling of Deep brain stimulation
- Anatomical data preprocessing and analysis
Qualifications
Educational and other Requirements for the position: Ph.D. or M.D. or M.D./Ph.D.
Experience Required:
- More than 2 years of experience in multimodal neuroimaging statistical analysis
- More than 2 years of experience in neuroimaging in deep brain stimulation
Goals/Outcomes of the Research Project:
- Identify key therapeutic pathways and build a new probabilistic stimulation atlas for ALIC DBS in OCD.
- Develop personalized DBS targeting for ALIC DBS to improve OCD symptoms.
- Characterize depression and OCD subtypes using structural and functional neuroimaging to establish patient selection biomarkers for psychiatric DBS.
Employment Type
Full-Time
