Each year thousands of Canadians experience brain damage caused by traumatic injury, neurological illness or stroke. While many of the resulting cognitive deficits are obvious, others are quite subtle and hard to measure.

Dr. Brian Levine and his colleagues at Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute are hoping to close that gap. “These deficits are often not readily apparent in standard neuropsychological or neurological examinations,” he explains.

For that reason they developing and using novel assessment and rehabilitation techniques, coupled with new brain imaging tools such as structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), and magnetoencephalography (MEG), a non-invasive technology that measures the magnetic fields generated by brain activity.

“The depth of scientific expertise, combined with the availability of technology at Baycrest is allowing us to do more intricate research,” says Dr. Levine, a senior scientist at the Institute and a professor in the Departments of Psychology and Medicine (Neurology) at the University of Toronto. “Besides gaining a better understanding of healthy and unhealthy brain function, our goal is to develop new and better interventions that will promote recovery and hasten rehabilitation.”

In 2010, Dr. Levine was engaged in two cognitive rehabilitation trials: one in patients with trau¬matic brain injury; the other involving people diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. A third trial, focused on patients affected by stroke, is starting.

“These conditions cause diffuse damage in the brain that we know interferes with connectivity and hinders executive functions – things like planning, staying on task and making decisions,” he says. Dr. Levine and his team have developed and are testing specific short-term interventions designed to help people improve executive functions.

Stroke research at Baycrest is supported by the Heart and Stroke Foundation Centre for Stroke Recovery. In 2009, Dr. Levine was chosen to lead the Centre’s Baycrest site.

While Dr. Levine’s career at Baycrest spans 16 years so far, a new generation of stroke researchers is arriving. Dr. Asaf Gilboa, who joined the Institute in 2010, is currently working to develop new and better interventions for stroke rehabilitation based on a clearer understanding of how the brain acquires memories.

In collaboration with his Insti¬tute mentor, senior scientist Dr. Morris Moscovitch, and graduate student Tali Sharon at the University of Haifa in Israel, Dr. Gilboa is studying patients with amnesia – severe memory loss – caused by brain damage following heart attack or stroke.

“Using learning principles that children employ when they learn new information, we were able to induce learning in people with severe amnesia,” explains Dr. Gilboa, who is also an assis¬tant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto. “We do this by encour¬aging the use of healthy parts of the brain instead of those that fail to work in these patients.”

Dr. Gilboa has also studied how memory works – and fails to work – in people affected by other diseases (Alzheimer’s Disease, brain tumors and infections), by traumatic brain injury, and by psychiatric disturbances such as Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and delusions. He uses a variety of brain imaging methods available to Baycrest researchers including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET).

As a recent arrival, how would Dr. Gilboa describe the research opportunities he has found at Baycrest? “It’s the best place for doing this kind of science,” he says. “Not just because of technical resources, but because of the intellectual resources and the atmosphere of collaboration. That’s what attracts and sustains us as scientists.”