Developing Tools for Understanding the Role of Calcification in Diseases of the Brain Vasculature

Despite the high prevalence of calcification in arteries, fundamental questions remain about the mechanical role of calcification in catastrophic medical events such as stroke and rupture of brain aneurysms. Calcification is highly prevalent in brain arteries and is found in a variety of phenotypes with regards to size, spatial distribution, porosity, and proximity to lipid pools. In this work, we will identify the diverse ways these distinct phenotypes impact the mechanical behavior of cerebral vessels.

The undergraduate researcher will develop an understanding of the medical problem by contributing to an in-depth literature review to identify the breadth of medical problems of the cerebrovascular that are impacted by vascular calcification. In parallel they will engage with Dr. Robertson and her team as they develop and validate a fully automated deep-learning-based image segmentation tool, capable of detecting regions of interest (calcification, lipid pools, surrounding matrix) in digital histological sections of atherosclerotic vessels.

The student will contribute to generating training sets for these studies and participate in the validation studies. This segmentation framework will be used to develop computational models for causative studies and for classification of calcification in medical data sets to identify clinical associations. The student researcher will engage in these studies as time permits.