neuro-imaging By Chris Rogers
resHaping Brain tHeOry neuroscientist randy Macintosh is driving urgently needed innovation around brain health
OntariO
With Ontario’s population getting older, innovations in the CNS (central nervous system) field, which deals primarily with diseases and repercussions of the aging brain are becoming more important than ever.
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Located at Baycrest, a world leading academic health science centre, RRI (Rotman Research Institute) is at the forefront of this fight to understand how the brain ages and mitigating the factors surrounding the development of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and problems such as stroke. By bringing together world-renowned researchers in a broad spectrum of disciplines, from cognitive neuro-psychologists to computer scientists, RRI is able to tackle its goal of comprehending the workings of memory and the executive functions of the brain. “The focus of the research institute at Baycrest is to understand both the aging brain as well as age related diseases and disorders,” said Dr. Randy McIntosh, senior scientist and director of RRI. Dr. McIntosh is a leader in the CNS field. His own research is geared to the development of a unified theory of brain operation that emphasizes the integrative capacity of the brain. Biotechnology Focus / May 2010
“The idea is to understand how different kinds of mental functions change as we age, how they can be worse if there is accompanying disease but also understand ways to try to stave off that change,” he explains. Part of his research focus is to understand the neuro-basis of those changes in terms of cognitive theories for memory and attention. “The main component of that, using modern neuro-imaging technology [is] to then use that information to develop more effective ways of staving off the declines, that’s with cognitive rehabilitation strategies as well as remediating it if there is a more protracted kind of decline that comes with things with mild cognitive impairment, dementia and/or stroke, and then tracking the efficacy of those therapies again going back and using the neuro-imaging technology as a way to validate that these therapies have direct benefit.” The benefit of working at an institution such as RRI is that it brings together a group of researchers from a diverse range of disciplines, all devoted to solving a common problem. The varied backgrounds of the scientific staff at RRI allows for unique solutions to be engineered. “If you address that problem from a number of different perspectives, the solutions to that problem end up being much more innovative then they would be if they were addressed with a typical kind of constrained focus from a given discipline,” says MacIntosh. In trying to understand memory, he explains that the typical approach is to let psychologists address it in a traditional environment such as a university. But the idea behind RRI has a much broader scope. A diverse group of psychologists, engineers, neurologists, physiologists and computer scientists, all approach memory from different avenues with their contrasting backgrounds allowing them to foster new solutions. “What you do is have the same problem but address it from different perspectives and that brings different ideas to the table, and you end up coming up with solutions that would not be possible if you focued on only one particular way of looking at the world,” said McIntosh. “It’s the idea of bringing different perspectives to the same problem and coming up with innovative solutions, I think it’s what differentiates the kind of work that we do with some other places.” He is quick to point out that this approach is also true for other research institutes across Ontario.
