Dr Stewart Wiseman (PhD)

Research Fellow

  • CCBS
  • DRI
  • Edinburgh Imaging

Contact details

Address

Street

Room FU427b
Chancellors Building
RIE 49 Little France Crescent

City
Edinburgh
Post code
EH16 4SB

Biography

Background

I am a Stroke Association Post-Doctoral Fellow and part time research radiographer at Edinburgh Imaging. My research interests include chronic systemic inflammatory arthropathies and their effects on the brain, and cerebral small vessel disease. My post doc focuses on the morphological changes in retinal vessels and retinal nerve fibre layers and relationships to cerebral small vessel disease.

My PhD investigated the role of inflammation in cerebral small vessel disease (SVD), work conducted under supervision of Professors Joanna Wardlaw (stroke; neuroimaging) and Stuart Ralston (rheumatology).  My PhD was cross-disciplinary as we were interested in inflammatory arthropathies and effects on the brain. I found, for the first time, an increased burden of enlarged perivascular spaces (PVS) as a marker of inflammation in a group of patients with systemic lupus erythematosus, a chronic inflammatory disease, versus healthy controls and stroke patients with overt SVD, suggesting that inflammation is associated with changes consistent with SVD in the brain. 

Since submitting my PhD, I have worked with Dr Mark Bastin looking at brain structural connectivity in relation to cognitive abilities in healthy ageing and with Professor Adam Waldman and Dr Maria Valdes Hernandez on management and image analysis for a large ongoing multi-centre observational cohort study of newly diagnosed relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis patients in Scotland. 

I am also a local investigator on a multi-site RCT comparing interventions designed to alleviate fatigue in patients with rheumatoid arthritis; here brain imaging is conducted pre- and post-intervention and I will investigate the neural correlates of fatigue.

 

Qualifications

PhD

Responsibilities & affiliations

Registered Diagnostic Radiographer with the Health Care and Professions Council

Research summary

Brain imaging and retinal imaging to understand pathophysiology of small vessel stroke and dementia

Project activity

Studies of small vessel disease (CI  = Professor Joanna Wardlaw)

Future MS (CI = Professor Siddharthan Chandran and Imaging Lead = Professor Adam Waldman)

LIFT-MRI (PI = Dr Neil Basu, University of Aberdeen)

 

 

Current project grants

LIFT-MRI (£278,850 Chief Scientists Office)

Past project grants

Lupus UK £27,312

View all 13 publications on Research Explorer

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