Crunching the Data: MRI-Powered Research Maps the Brain's Role in Swallowing

4/23/2024 Beth Hart

Bioengineering Professor Brad Sutton is co-leader of a study to use MRI to visualize both brain and muscle activity during the swallowing process. Their work is aimed at improving the diagnosis and management of swallowing impairment, particularly for patients with Parkinson’s Disease or recovering from a stroke.

Written by Beth Hart

MRI-based researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Carle Illinois College of Medicine are revealing new insights into how the brain controls the swallowing process and how the process changes with age. Their work is aimed at improving the diagnosis and management of swallowing impairment, particularly for patients with Parkinson’s Disease or recovering from a stroke.

<em>Anthony Bosshardt</em> — *Anthony Bosshardt*

A key part of the research team’s recent advances was a creative software solution innovated by Carle Illinois College of Medicine (CI MED) student Anthony Bosshardt. By pivoting the team’s strategy for data calculations, Bosshardt helped unlock a wealth of data from large MRI images to map brain activity during the swallowing process.

“Having a program that can efficiently analyze simultaneously acquired fMRI/MRI datasets means we can acquire more detailed (and thus larger) images,” Bosshardt said. With his expertise in computer programming languages, Bosshardt leveraged a memory-efficient technology to handle specific calculations that were bogging down in earlier attempts.

Bioengineering and CI MED Health Innovation Professor Brad Sutton is co-leader of the five-year study funded by the National Institutes of Health to use MRI to visualize both brain and muscle activity during the swallowing process. Using Sutton’s patented SimulScan system, researchers hope to improve on current clinical evaluation methods (including video fluoroscopy technology) that reveal only the mechanics of the swallowing process. “With SimulScan, we simultaneously obtain dynamic images of the swallow during natural saliva swallows while the patient is in the MRI scanner, at the same time as getting functional brain images associated with those swallows,” Sutton said. “This method will enable clinicians to better understand what brain networks are involved in controlling the swallow and how those networks adapt in disease.”

Specifically, SimulScan could improve assessment and management for patients after a stroke or Parkinson’s Disease diagnosis. “This can be used to predict swallowing outcomes from stroke, provide feedback during rehabilitation, and be used to monitor progress in a patient towards being able to safely swallow on their own,” Sutton said.

To draw the right conclusions about the interplay of mind and muscle, Sutton’s team relies on both high-resolution MRI images of the entire swallowing process and a way to extract and compute data from those images. “My lab had been working hard on getting the MRI part of the imaging just right. We were spending all our time on the sequence, and we were not sure if the information we were hoping for was in the data,” Sutton said. He says initial data runs showed his lab’s high-power computer stations were unable to keep up with both incoming data and the computations required.

That’s when Sutton connected with CI MED student Bosshardt, a software engineer with industry experience in working with large image files.

“The maps that Anthony is producing [see image] show how particular motions of the different anatomical components involved in swallowing are driven by different patterns of brain activity,” Sutton said. “This enables us to use the data itself to understand how the brain is controlling the swallow while avoiding issues with brain motion during swallowing.”

This figure shows the imaging that is possible with SimulScan. A dynamic image of swallowing is obtained, similar to the image on the left. The middle panel zooms in on the tongue, lips, and pharynx, which will have swallowing motion that the team is interested in. In the right-hand panel is brain function associated with swallowing, showing activations in muscle control regions associated with the tongue and lips, indicated by arrows. The bottom, middle panel shows the regions in the dynamic image that are correlated with those brain activations, showing movement of the base of the tongue and top of the tongue dorsum as dynamic regions impacted by the brain activity shown.

The team is sharing their insights with the international research community. Bosshardt presented a talk about the team’s work, “Developing Improved Visualization of the Swallow in SimulScan: Simultaneous Functional MRI and Dynamic Imaging of Swallowing with MRI,” at the annual meeting of the Dysphagia Research Society in Puerto Rico in March. He will present a power pitch and a poster on the more technical aspects of the research to the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine annual conference in Singapore in May.

Speech, swallowing, and voice science expert, Professor Georgia Malandraki of Purdue University, is the project co-leader. Collaborators include Drs. Paul Arnold and Suguna Pappu at Carle Health; Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Zhi-Pei Liang, who manages image reconstruction components; and Anatomy Professor Bill Pearson of Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine, who assists with computational analysis.

Brad Sutton is a Health Innovation Professor at Carle Illinois College of Medicine, professor of bioengineering, and Technical Director of the Biomedical Imaging Center at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Research reported in this publication is supported by the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01AG078513. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

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This story was published April 23, 2024.