PHSA/UBC researcher studies the use of movies in developmental functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research
Vancouver, September 30, 2024 – Tamara Vanderwal is a child psychiatrist and clinician scientist affiliated with PHSA and the University of British Columbia (UBC). Dr. Vanderwal oversees the Naturalistic Neuroimaging Lab, where her team uses movie-functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI – a type of brain scan that maps changes in blood flow that relate to brain activity), to study functional brain organization in children and youth.
“One of the main advantages of movie-fMRI is that it makes it possible to scan younger children, and to scan older youth for longer than usual,” she noted in a recent email. “We also use the movies to drive activity in the brain so we can study function while the brain is active and working, similar to how it is in daily life.”
The research program relates to her clinical work and is supported by the BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute (BCCHR – part of PHSA). Her main focus area is youth with depression, and the lab recently received a catalyst grant from the Brain, Behaviour and Development Theme at BCCHR to use movie-fMRI to study adolescent females with depression.
The ideas is to use movie-fMRI to get enough data to track what changes in an individual patient’s brain when they get better. The movies are chosen to drive the emotion-related circuits thought to be important in depression. This work is a collaboration with Dr. Roberto Sassi, who is the head of child and youth mental health at BC Children’s, and Dr. Fidel Vila-Rodriguez, a UBC-based researcher with expertise in interventional treatments for adults with depression.
“One of my favourite things about movie-fMRI is that it lends itself to all sorts of collaborations,” Dr. Vanderwal noted. Another example is the lab’s current collaboration with Dr. Evelyn Stewart, who directs the pediatric Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Psychiatry Research (POP) program. Together, they have produced and are testing a movie (called All Day Wrong) that youth with OCD watch during fMRI brain scans. Here, the idea is to learn more about functional brain differences while patients are watching and processing information that relates to their symptoms.
Dr. Vanderwal presented her work at Research Canada’s Virtual Parliamentary Health Research Caucus e-Health Event in May 2024. “There were around 200 attendees at the meeting, and presentations were about everything from robots to apps, virtual reality, data sharing and wearables, to our work using movies inside the MRI scanner,” she recalled. “There was a lot of positive excitement and interest in these innovations from different advocacy groups, parliamentarians, and members of the public in the audience.”
“There is really interesting work being done across Canada, and people are impatient for progress. There was a clear feeling that funding this work is worthwhile and will lead to improvements in health,” she continued. “As a physician, though, I also think we are trying to solve some fundamental health-care problems with innovation instead of the basics like more nurses, more doctors, etc., and obviously, I think that we need both.”
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