MS Thesis Defense: Haley Richards

For the optional Zoom link, please email haley.c.richards.TH@dartmouth.edu.

"Stroke imaging with electrical impedance: Clinical considerations"

Abstract

Timely detection and treatment of neurological complications after acute stroke improves patient outcomes. While intracranial monitoring is notoriously challenging, Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is one method of continuous and noninvasive neuromonitoring that has been explored in recent years. EIT gives real-time spatial information on the conductivity of the brain and is hereby well-suited to detect, localize, and distinguish stroke. While EIT does not have the spatial resolution of CT or MRI imaging, it can be used in a multimodal neuromonitoring approach to inform diagnostic and therapeutic interventions. However, due to the ill-posed nature of the EIT problem and challenges collecting clinical data, EIT has seen limited use in human studies, particularly in an acute patient population.

This thesis identifies barriers to clinical translation and introduces software strategies to adapt EIT stroke imaging to an inpatient setting. This work was developed alongside an ongoing first-in-human study at Dartmouth-Hitchcock evaluating EIT and EEG monitoring of acute stroke. Key contributions involve a portable electrode digitization system, a patient-specific mesh generation workflow, and optimized reconstruction algorithms. These techniques make progress on challenges in clinical EIT brain imaging and propose a modeling framework to pave the way for future studies.

Thesis Committee

• Prof. Ethan Murphy, PhD (Chair)
• Prof. Ryan Halter, PhD
• Dr. Yinchen Song, PhD
• Prof. XiaoYao Fan, PhD

Contact

For more information, contact Theresa Fuller at theresa.d.fuller@dartmouth.edu.