Hendrik Santosa receives Trailblazer Award from National Institute of Health

Hendrik Santosa, a faculty member in the Radiology Department at the University of Pittsburgh, has been granted an R21 Trailblazer Award by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), a division of the National Institute of Health (NIH). This award supports his project titled “Cognitive Domains Classification Using fNIRS-EEG.” This project is a collaborative effort between Hendrik Santosa and Theodore Huppert, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Pittsburgh.

This project proposes a paradigm shifting analysis approach where instead of using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and electroencephalography (EEG) to estimate and test the de novo brain activation pattern for a specific task, we utilize our existing knowledge of common patterns of brain activity from similar tasks done in fMRI to create a set of testable [null] hypothesis. Notably, this approach abandons the conventional “brain imaging” approach where one estimates the statistical heatmap of the brain activity for specific temporal components of a task. Instead, we use the existing fMRI maps to perform analysis using “activation patterns-of-interest”. In this project, we propose that brain signals can be reparametrized and compressed by projecting the neuroimaging data into representations of underlying “cognitive domains”. The 5^th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) provides a common framework for the diagnosis of neurocognitive disorders which is the product of more than 10 years effort by hundreds of international experts in all aspect of mental health which agreed on six principal domains of cognition to classify neurocognitive disorders (i.e., language, perceptual-motor, executive function, complex attention, social cognition, and learning-memory). This new project specifically proposes utilizing multimodal fNIRS and EEG to create a cost-effective and portable neuroimaging technology.

The Trailblazer R21 award program support to early career researchers, providing $400,000 in direct costs over a span of three years. This substantial allocation of resources and time enables the pursuit of emerging research programs and high-potential projects. A Trailblazer project may encompass exploratory, developmental, proof-of-concept, or high-risk, high-impact endeavors. The project’s focus could range from technology design-driven to discovery-driven or hypothesis-driven. It is noteworthy that applicants are encouraged to propose research approaches for which preliminary data are either minimal or nonexistent.