Project Summary
This project includes both development of advanced MRI sequences to study brain stiffness as well as a
clinical application of this technique to study brain health in children with autism. Currently 1 in 88 children in the
United States are diagnosed with autism. Autism is characterized by physical and neurological deficits often
including changes in regional brain volume. This indicates that brain development may be affected by autism
and contributes to its clinical and behavioral expression. However, autism causality is largely unknown making
it challenging to diagnose autism, assess severity, and provide quantitative metrics for rehabilitation.
Investigation of brain health in people with autism has been limited, as in vivo assessments of microstructural
properties are challenging in such a population. One technique is magnetic resonance elastography (MRE),
which is the first noninvasive, sensitive, repeatable neuroimaging technique capable of generating mechanical
property measurements for assessing brain microstructural health. Brain mechanical properties are affected by
neurodegenerative disease, and recently, global brain integrity deficits in children with cerebral palsy have been
observed. MRE measures are sensitive to even subtle individual differences in brain health, that relate to
cognitive function, aerobic fitness or response to intervention and therefore, brain tissue viscoelasticity,
measured with MRE, can quantify how neural tissue microstructure affects the social, linguistic, and
developmental delays seen in children with autism. Brain stiffness in children with autism, however, has never
been studied in vivo. The objective of this research is to use MRE to study brain health in children with autism
and to understand how these brain mechanical properties are related to functional measures such as cognitive
skills, linguistic skills, and behavior. Accomplishing this goal will provide a framework for diagnosis and
intervention in this population. However, MRE is an inherently long MRI technique, and it requires a subject to
lay still for an extended period of time in a small space, which makes it very challenging to perform this scan in
children with disabilities. We are prepared to implement faster scan times to optimally tailor our MRE acquisition
toward children with autism. Due to the need to capture tissue deformation in multiple directions over time, MRE
is highly spatiotemporally redundant, and can be modeled as a low rank problem for accelerated imaging. To do
this we will design a spatiotemporal data under-sampling technique, called OSCILLATE, and the k-space data
will be reconstructed with a low rank joint image reconstruction across all sampled time points. Upon successful
completion of this project we will have quantified brain mechanical differences in subjects with classic autistic
disorder to provide basis for diagnosis and intervention. We will have established a novel protocol for faster MRE
acquisition for use in studying any child with atypical neurological development. Our team is in an unparalleled
position of facilities, research contacts, MRE technical development experience and pediatric MRE experience
to carry out this research.