David Welchew
MA PhD (Cantab), BMBCh (Oxon), MRCPsych
Post Doctoral Clinical Research Fellow
- Specialty Training Registrar (ST5), Oxford Health NHS FT
I take a novel approach to identifying and modelling frontal connections of the brain by studying how different tasks affect the degree of correlation between regions. I have developed new statistical techniques to measure how greatly these connections are altered by disease conditions, through drugs, or by training, and have created an automated tool for multivariate analysis called PolyPEMON to investigate this. These techniques have been used to study schizophrenia, autism and Alzheimer's disease using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
My aim is to create a more complete model of the brain states underlying psychotic illnesses, particularly the patterns of functional connectivity that might characterise the transition from healthy to psychotic states. I intend to explore this using magnetoencephalography (MEG), a form of neuroimaging that can track changes in brain activity far more quickly than is possible using fMRI. I have a particular clinical and research interest in the psychotic state that emerges in anti-NMDA receptor antibody encephalitis, an autoimmune form of limbic encephalitis, and am currently setting up a project to model this.