I am faking it – have I got your attention?

I am faking it – have I got your attention?

I have always found it fascinating that the brain, such a delicate structure, can tolerate such high doses of radiation with relatively little obvious adverse effects. However, digging under the surface, we know that our patients with brain tumours suffer a number of subtle neurocognitive deficits, from short term memory registration, and fatigue to task switching and holding attention. We are undertaking initial work to use synthetic MRI to build maps of white matter connectivity, and auto-segmentation algorithms to parse out the key processing areas of the brain – the so called ‘attention networks’. We believe that this approach will give us a better ability to correlate radiation dose and neurocognitive outcomes for our patients.