Research 2006
Solving Medical Mysteries...
with Physics
Melanie Martin
Assistant Professor, Physics
The brain is one of the body’s most delicate organs, and one of the most mysterious. Until a few years ago, Alzheimer’s disease could only be diagnosed after death. The relationship between intensity of symptoms and extent of brain lesions in Multiple Sclerosis (MS), which occurs in Manitobans at one of the highest rates in Canada, is still not understood.
Assistant Professor Melanie Martin is tackling these medical research challenges with Physics. Martin is developing innovative Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) techniques that allow researchers to view the abnormal protein masses (plaques) of Alzheimer’s disease and the lesions of MS—in the nerves and brains of living patients.
“What really got me into MRI is that I was looking through MRI books with pictures of the inside of a person’s body. The person didn’t feel any pain and we didn’t have to cut anything,” says Martin. “It’s absolutely thrilling to me that I can see inside people’s brains without hurting them.”
One of Martin’s goals is to perfect a technique to view individual plaques in a patient’s brain which would allow researchers to study the relationship between plaques and symptoms or to study the effects of drug treatments on the plaques of Alzheimer’s disease. In 2004, Martin was one of the first researchers to develop a method to detect individual protein plaques in live mice using only MRI. Now she’s improving her method to view more plaques in a single image.
Martin is also studying how specific optic nerve lesions affect vision in MS patients. “If we find a correlation, we can concentrate on a cure,” says Martin. “This is multi-disciplinary research so I’m working with a lot of biologists, neuroscientists, chemists, and engineers,” says Martin. “It’s really exciting to me to be able to talk to people from different fields and work together on how we can solve a problem, because I don’t think any one of us could solve it alone.”
This type of research also benefits students, who graduate with an understanding of MR Physics. “These students can continue in research or go on to multi-disciplinary medical studies. It opens up all kinds of opportunities.”
To learn more about her research on Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and its use in research on Alzheimer’s disease and Multiple Sclerosis, contact University of Winnipeg faculty member Melanie Martin at m.martin@uwinnipeg.ca