Elizabeth Thompson
associate professor of electrical engineering

The 21st century has brought vast new meanings to the concept of the word "map." With GIS technology and Google Earth, we have finely detailed, interactive maps of the entire globe at our fingertips. We have talking maps in our car dashboards, we have maps charting concentrations of scientific information and knowledge. Perhaps most dazzling of all, we are have better and better maps of the human brain.

Brain mapping is at the heart of groundbreaking research done by Elizabeth Thompson, associate professor of electrical engineering at Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne. Thompson explores human brain mapping using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This technique uses MRI technology to create brain activation maps relating brain activity to task performance. Thompson investigates new methods for forming brain maps, which can provide medical experts insight into the inner workings of the brain. Her work is relevant for many people, particularly those with disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, strokes, chronic pain, dyslexia, and epilepsy.

"Brain mapping has multiple purposes," Thompson says. "It can be used for any brain disorder. It's standard practice now to do a functional brain map of somebody's brain before surgery. For instance, if someone has a tumor, surgeons can perform these functional brain maps and then know where to cut so that the patient doesn't have permanent brain damage after they remove the tumor."

Thompson's work has focused on improving a technique for analyzing data from fMRI tests. She uses the Space-Time Adaptive Processing (STAP) algorithm, a sophisticated statistical computing program. Thompson's application of the STAP technique to fMRI tests enabled the analysis of larger data sets with multiple brain activations. In a recent study, she concluded that incorporating STAP leads to improvement in detecting brain activations and is useful in revealing spatial and temporal connectivity.

To study the algorithm, Thompson worked with patients at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital. "We had patients do a specific task while in the MRI machine," she says. "We compared the magnetic resonance signal between the time they were resting and the time they were active. The difference in the signal is very, very subtle."

With her findings, Thompson is developing a computer program that will better map regions of the brain. Her research also has the potential to improve other aspects of medical imaging technology. "I still have a lot to learn about medical imaging of the brain," she says, "and I want to look at other modalities besides MRI."