Neurodegenerative Disease PhD Project

For my PhD I am working to better understand brain functioning in Huntington’s disease (HD), Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and healthy ageing, using converging methods that incorporate neurocognitive measures, functional brain activity and modelling. This is close to what I worked on for my Master project where I only compared subjects with AD and healthy age-matched controls. The measurements use electroencephalogram (EEG) which measures the electrical activity of the brain and near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) which measures changes in the oxygenation concentration in the brain. The combination of these two methods provide a powerful approach to the regulation of cognitive neural networks. The link between increased neuronal activity and increased blood flow is known as neurovascular coupling, and there is compelling evidence that neurovascular coupling is impaired in several neurodegenerative diseases including AD and HD. My interest is to see how these non-invasive measuring methods can be used to distinguish healthy elderly subjects from subjects with AD and HD, and to see if the different diseases can be characterized from the data. Many studies have already looked at the EEG power spectra in both HD and AD, and interesting differences from controls have been found. Functional connectivity studies have also defined differences between diseased subjects and controls. My research interest is to study the dynamics of the signals, to see how they change in time and how they are related. For this time-frequency analysis methods are used – such as the Wavelet transform. The aim is also to see how the changes in dynamics are correlated with different cognitive tests, in order to probe the complex links between cognition and brain dynamics.