Biography
- Dr. Manoj Sarma (Assistant Researcher, UCLA Radiological Sciences) was recently awarded a two-year R21 grant for his project entitled "Brain Connectivity, Cerebral metabolism and Neuropsychology in HIV Youths" by NINDS/NIH.
- Although earlier neuroimaging studies investigated brain connectivity and neurochemical changes in HIV adults, brain connectivity changes have not been studied in perinatally HIV-infected youths.
- Also, the relationship of cerebral metabolic disturbance to neurocognitive and functional abnormalities in HIV has not been well delineated.
- Dr. Sarma's proposed work combining resting state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) with semi-LASER based 3D Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopic Imaging (MRSI) will impact the field with a better understanding of the functional neural and metabolic correlates in perinatally infected youths.
- Dr. Sarma is working with Dr. Albert Thomas, Director of MR Spectroscopy at UCLA Radiology and a pioneer of various multi-dimensional MRSI techniques including 2D Localized correlated MR spectroscopy (L-COSY).
- This project will be in collaboration with Dr. Margaret Keller at Pediatric Infectious Diseases unit, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.
- Dr. Sarma's specialty area of research includes development of novel in-vivo imaging techniques involving MRS/MRI for the study of brain, development and implementation of fast imaging techniques.
- He has been working on MRI/MRSI pulse sequence development, signal processing, and data analysis within interdisciplinary teams in various projects like HIV-infected youths, obstructive sleep apnea, Hepatitis C, hepatic encephalopathy, prostate cancer, and Diabetes.
Research interests
- Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy
- Accelerated Imaging
- Pulse Sequence Development
- HIV
- T2DM
- OSA