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| Associate Professor Suzanne Miller |
Associate Professor Suzanne Miller, an NHMRC
senior research fellow in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology has been
awarded Faculty of Science and Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences
(MNHS) Interdisciplinary Research Seed Funding to improve brain imaging of
newborns using X-Ray CT.
The $30,000 grant enables
Associate Professor Miller to collaborate with Dr Marcus Kitchen from the
School of Physics and Astronomy and a large multidisciplinary team to improve
cerebral palsy outcomes by visualising brain development with unprecedented
image quality.
The study is the first quantitative comparison of phase
contrast CT with MRI for neonatal brain pathology.
Associate Professor Miller,
who is also Deputy Director of The Ritchie Centre (Monash University and Hudson
Institute), said the long-term aim of this work is to
detect the neonatal brain injury that underlies cerebral palsy as early as
possible, with optimal sensitivity and ease of application.
“Our collaborative project aims to
develop X-ray CT imaging methodology for imaging the brain with far higher
resolution and contrast than any other commercially available CT system on the
market,” Associate Professor Miller said.
“MRI is currently considered gold-standard
for imaging the brain, however this is not always feasible for newborn infants
and it’s expensive.”
“We hope to optimise the sensitivity
of CT imaging for the newborn brain, and we will quantitatively compare phase
contrast CT against MRI for detection of neuropathology in pre-clinical models.”
The project builds on a recent publication by the
team, Croton et al. In situ phase contrast X-ray brain CT, Scientific
Reports, accepted July 2018.
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