Researcher in Regina to discuss new advances in MRI techniques

REGINA — Dr. Melanie Martin hopes her research on the brain will allow her to make tools doctors can use to diagnose multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease earlier and with more confidence.

“Ultimately, I hope all the work I’m doing will lead to cures for these diseases,” Martin said.

The associate professor of physics at the University of Winnipeg was in Regina on Friday speaking to undergraduate students at the University of Regina about her cutting-edge work as part of the Canadian Association of Physicists lecture tour.

The physicist described the innovative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques she’s developing that allow researchers to view the brain in real time.

People with Alzheimer’s disease have beta-amyloid plaques in the brain, Martin said.

Before 2005, no imaging methods detected the plaques so doctors relied on memory tests and checked for traumas or other reasons to explain the dementia.

“They were fairly good at saying, ‘We’ve eliminated everything else and we really think this is Alzheimer’s disease.’ But they were never able to get that confirmation,” Martin said.

Positron emission tomography (PET) scans can confirm Alzheimer’s disease, but it doesn’t provide answers about how to treat it.

“What they’re finding is these plaques are showing up too late — the symptoms are there before the plaques are there,” Martin said. “What we’re trying to do now is find an earlier biomarker — something in the anatomy or in the function that’s going to tell us, ‘This person is going to develop Alzheimer’s disease.’ ”

As a person ages the brain shrinks, but the brain of someone with Alzheimer’s disease shrinks faster. Martin believes an area of the brain that shrinks rapidly with Alzheimer’s disease is the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory.

Using an MRI, she has devised a method to measure the brain shrinkage.

“Then my collaborators would come in with their treatments and since I have the method to measure it, they could throw their treatments at it and I could measure and see if their treatments are doing anything,” Martin said.

Presently, her research focuses on mice.

“What we’re looking for now is a mouse model that has this shrinkage,” she said. “If we can get it in the mouse, then they can try their treatment on the mice and then it can move on to the humans.”

She is also working on correlating changes in the brain’s MRI image with MS symptoms.

“What we see does not seem to correlate with what’s going on with the person,” Martin said. “We can either see lots of changes and see nothing wrong with the person or a clean brain and they are really sick.”

Complicating matters is that MS patients often experience periods of remission.

The brain’s nerves have a protective covering called myelin that acts like insulators on electrical wires. People with MS have damaged myelin so it’s like the brain’s wires are short circuiting resulting in nerve damage.

Three problems could be going on and all three will have a different signature on an MRI, Martin said. The problem is isolating which signature or signatures correlate with a symptom.

“If we could break down what’s happening in the brain and what the symptoms are, maybe that’s where the correlation could be,” she said.

MS is called a white matter disease.

“White matter in the brain is the part that has the myelin, so these methods apply to any other diseases that have white matter damage,” Martin said. “We think schizophrenia might have some white matter damage, so we’re trying to apply these methods to schizophrenia as well.”

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