PhD position brain imaging and modeling

The University Medical Center Utrecht (UMCU) has an open position for a PhD candidate on imaging and modeling the cortical vasculature of the human brain. The PhD project is part of the ‘Virtual Cerebrovascular Responses’ research program, funded by the Netherland Organization for Scientific Research under the Human Measurement Models program.

Many brain pathologies including dementia, stroke, and small vessel disease have recently been associated with dysfunction of small cortical vessels. Cortical vessel function is dependent on their geometry, topology, and hemodynamic response to neurometabolic needs. Almost everything we know about cortical vessel function is derived from rodents, because state-of-the-art techniques to investigate these vessels are invasive and destructive. Translation of findings from rodents to humans is complicated though because of differences in cortical vessel anatomy between species. To advance human research we need accurate assessment of cortical vessel function from non-invasive human imaging, but individual small cortical vessels are invisible at the spatial resolution of non-invasive imaging techniques. The aim of the research program is to develop an empirically-informed computational model that integrates the human small vessel geometry, topology, and hemodynamic response, and that enables assessment of cortical vessel function from non-invasive MRI.

In this PhD project you will develop a computational model of the human cortical vasculature based on ex-vivo and in-vivo measurements from the human brain. You will exploit recent breakthroughs in 3D light-sheet microscopy to image and create virtual maps the anatomy of cortical vessels in ex-vivo samples of the human cortex, and combine these maps with hemodynamic simulations. As a starting point you will use our existing computational model for hemodynamic simulations which is based on rodent data. You will further develop this model for the human brain, and validate it with highly detailed measurements of hemodynamic responses obtained from the human brain with intra-cranial optical imaging and non-invasive functional MRI at 7T.