Today, April 29, Gustav Magnusson defended his Ph.D. thesis Cerebrovascular reactivity measurements in patients with Aneurysmal Subarachnoid Hemorrhage. Gustav has been co-supervised by Gunnar Cedersund and Maria Engström, who have collaborated for many years on modelling of the brain, with a focus on modelling and understanding the BOLD and fMRI-signals, using multi-modal MRI data.
In this Ph.D. project, we have expanded the MRI-side of this collaboration, to create a new measurement approach to monitor subarachnoid hemorrhage patients. The underlying problem is that these patients, who have gotten a severe type of a stroke, have a high risk of getting a second stroke, around 7 days after the initial bleeding. Therefore, these patients are in intensive monitoring at the neurointensive care unit.
In this project, we have tested a new approach to monitoring: to combine CO2-perturbations with measurements of blood flow. The basic hypothesis is that patients that are on the verge of having a secondary ischemic event (a second stroke), show a lower response to CO2-perturbation, indicating stiffer and less responsive blood vessels. Gustav has developed this technology, and tested it on both healthy volunteers and real patients. As a next step, we are now going to start modelling of these data, to understand the mechanistic basis for these processes.
This project was funded by the Brain Foundation and by the EU-project STRATIF-AI, which focuses on stroke, and which is coordinated by Gunnar Cedersund. Maria Engström was the main supervisor on paper. However, the main supervisor in practice was Anders Tisell, an MR-physicist at Region Östergötland. The two other co-supervisors were the neurosurgeon Lovisa Tobieson and the neurologist Charalampos Georgiopoulos.
Congratulations Gustav to a successfully defended thesis!
