The Brainstem Navigator toolkit: tutorial and translational application to traumatic coma and premanifest synucleinopathy

The first part of this seminar will be focused on providing a tutorial of the Brainstem Navigator toolkit. This toolkit includes an in-vivo atlas of 31 brainstem nuclei developed by Dr. Bianciardi’s team, which can be applied to the image of any patient collected with conventional (for example 3 Tesla) MRI scanners and facilitate investigation of brainstem structure and function in health and disease. The tutorial will include discussion about nuclei location, thresholding and coregistration routines. Further, Dr Bianciardi will show the first translational application of the brainstem nuclei atlas to investigate arousal and motor mechanisms in traumatic coma and premanifest synucleinopathy. The last part of this seminar will be a quiz-recap about brainstem imaging and the Brainstem Navigator. Please, bring a cell phone or other device to play a quiz with us on an online game-based learning platform.