Neuroscience

Our division is based in both Ninewells Hospital and the School of Life Sciences (SLS), undertaking clinical trials and translational studies on a range of brain disorders, including neurodegenerative diseases, brain vascular disease, chronic pain, and neuropsychiatric illnesses.

Our PICTURES study, funded by an MRC Program Grant, uses routinely acquired NHS ‘large data’ stored in the local NHS Tayside Safe Haven, in combination with neuroimaging and development of novel machine learning methods, to make clinically useful predictions of future Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia risk for individual patients. SCAN-DAN is a follow-on study with the same aims, based in the national Scottish Safe Haven hosted by Edinburgh.

Division studies on vascular disease include the development of stents and endovascular interventions for acute stroke at the newly refurbished Wilson House as the Tayside Innovation MedTech Ecosystem (TIME) funded by the Tay Cities Deal. The division has an established active collaboration with the School of Science and Engineering (SSEN) as the Centre for Medical Engineering and Technology (CMET), one of the Medical School’s cross-cutting themes, with studies including the development and application of neuroimaging and machine learning for neuroscience studies.

The division is part of the MRC-funded Consortium Against Pain Inequality (CAPE) study investigating the impact of adverse childhood experiences on chronic pain and treatment outcomes, the MRC funded Partnership for Assessment and Investigation of Neuropathic Pain (PAINSTORM) study, and the MRC-funded ALLEVIATE study for managing large volumes of data generated in studies on chronic pain.

The division benefits from access to the Clinical Research Imaging Centre (CRIF) in Ninewells Hospital, which provides neuroimaging facilities used for the PAINSTORM study. In the past CRIF allowed collection of data from more than 500 volunteers as part of the Wellcome Trust-funded STRADL study which now forms part of the Dundee CAPE dataset. CRIF hosts Scotland’s only MR guided Focused Ultrasound (MRgFUS) facility, which provides MRI-guided surgical treatment for NHS patients with Essential Tremor, and a commercial clinical trial of MRgFUS treatment for tremor dominant Parkinson’s disease, run by the division.

Division work based in SLS focusses on neurodegenerative diseases: Alzheimer’s and other dementias, Parkinson’s, and motor neurone disease: synaptic mechanisms, DNA mutations, proteomics, immune-based arrays, tau and beta-amyloid, cellular stress, and rare and common variants of proteins. The work is funded by the MRC Protein Phosphorylation Unit, MRC grants, Alzheimer’s Society and other charities.

The division runs courses and contributes to modules in Medicine, Life Sciences, and Science and Engineering including: MSc Applied Neuroscience, BMSc Neuropharmacology and Behaviour, and BSc Neuroscience. It also contributes teaching to core neuroscience modules in Biomedical Sciences (BBSE) led by Life Sciences, and teaching and project supervision for courses led by Science and Engineering relevant to machine learning development.