The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering announced Dr. Erin Buckley will receive a promotion to associate professor with tenure, effective Sept. 1. Erin first joined the department and founded her lab with a focus on translational diffuse spectroscopies for brain monitoring in 2015. Since then, the lab has published over 20 papers and numerous more conference abstracts and has hosted more than 30 members in total. On behalf of the entire lab – past and present – congratulations Erin!!!!!
Monthly Archives: July 2023
New paper out characterizing normative morphology of cerebral microvascular blood flow waveforms measured with diffuse correlation spectroscopy
In our latest work published in Biomedical Optics Express, Tara Urner et al. present quantification of the average morphology of cardiac waveforms in the cerebral blood flow signal measured with diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS), and how these waveforms behave in response to vasomotor changes. Pulse waveform analysis has long been used with the current state-of-the-art technique for capturing macrovascular blood flow – transcranial doppler ultrasound (TCD) – but cardiac pulsatility at the microvascular level in the brain has only recently become accessible at the bedside using DCS. Several groups have taken initial steps towards applying waveform analysis to DCS-derived blood flow for clinical applications, but knowledge of what “normal” waveforms should look like has been lacking. This work aims to lay the groundwork for future clinical applications of DCS combined with waveform analysis by presenting typical resting-state values for a variety of morphological features as well as quantify waveform response to a vasoactive stimulus. The authors found that the blood flow waveform exhibited marked changes with vasodilation including increasing pulse amplitude and area under the curve. Additionally, significant sex-based difference were observed in the waveform, consistent with previous findings with TCD. These exciting results set the stage for DCS-derived blood flow waveform morphology to provide much-needed noninvasive biomarkers of cerebrovascular health and disease.
Fig. 1.