Edinburgh Imaging

26 Apr 17. Congrats Dr Dickie!

Dr David Dickie has been awarded a 3 year Stroke Association Postdoctoral Fellowship with the goal of increasing the utility of routinely collected brain MR data for patients with stroke.

Dr Dickie will be supervised by Dr Jesse Dawson at University of Glasgow & by Prof Joanna Wardlaw at The University of Edinburgh.

The fellowship will use both high field (3T) & ultra high field (7 T) brain MRI scans from stroke survivors to quantify the varying degrees of brain damage associated with stroke.

By better characterising these areas of damage, we may predict how well patients will do in the long-term, providing doctors with the means to make earlier diagnoses and improve outcomes after stroke.

We hope that this work will accurately predict long-term adverse outcomes after stroke, for example dementia - before they actually happen; and by doing so, treatments can be administered earlier and stroke survivors may live fuller lives for longer.

Dr David DickieClinical Research Specialist

Without this fellowship it would be difficult to target patients who would respond to potential treatments for stroke-related brain damage.

By missing these patients we may underestimate the true efficacy of some treatments and miss opportunities to improve cognitive symptoms.

The benefits of the Fellowship

David explains that the benefits of the fellowship are twofold:

  • to identify potentially responsive patients for clinical trials of, for example, intensive vascular risk factor reduction, based on their cerebrovascular brain damage profile
  • to provide doctors with mechanisms to predict & treat long-term cognitive decline associated with stroke related brain damage