Transformative Neuroscience Pilot Grants in Human Neuroscience
Jeff Liu, PhD, P. Tom Fletcher, PhD, Patrick Finan, PhD, Mark Quigg, MD, Shayan Moosa, MD, & W. Jeff Elias, MD -
Departments of Neurosurgery, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Anesthesiology, and Neurology
Interdisciplinary Team Science to Uncover the Mechanisms of Pain Relief by Spinal Cord Stimulation
$5 Million Grant Boosts Innovative Effort to Treat Chronic Pain
UVA Health researchers are pioneering a new way to treat chronic pain that does not respond to medication. Their innovative approach will receive more than $5 million from the National Institutes of Health to fund a clinical trial to develop brain stimulation for severe pain conditions.
Conceived by a new pain research team at UVA, the approach aims to modulate pain signals from deep inside the brain. The group has early evidence that a region of the brain called the insula plays an important role in our perception of pain. Based on that evidence, the team will optimize an established “neuromodulation” technique called deep brain stimulation for use in the insula, in the hopes it will provide much-needed pain relief.
If successful, the approach could shed light on the fundamental nature of pain itself, the researchers say.
See complete study on UVA health Newsroom
Tyler Spears - Electrical and Computer Engineering Mentors: Tom Fletcher; Jeff C. Liu
Tyler Spears is a PhD candidate in the Electrical and Computer Engineering program. He has recently started working on a project to analyze the white matter pathways involved in chronic pain using diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI).
Under the mentorship of Dr. Fletcher and Dr. Liu, Tyler plans to develop a deep neural network for learning features from high-quality dMRI in the Human Connectome Project. The model will learn how to transfer these high-quality image features to clinical dMRI scans. This research will have significant impact in neurosurgical treatment of chronic pain, including in targeting transcranial focused ultrasound and in tracking changes to the brain white matter following a procedure.
Sounding Out the Future of Focused Ultrasound
UVA's Dr. Jeffrey Elias, who pioneered the use of high-intensity soundwaves to treat tremor and Parkinson’s disease, has now set his sights on erasing chronic pain.
Fear of Pain Memory Acquisition and Extinction in Humans
Using intracranial recordings from patients with epilepsy, we aim to explore the brain mechanisms supporting pain-related fear acquisition and extinction.
Jeff Changchia Liu (PI), Per Benjamin Sederberg, William Jeff Elias
