Donald Gross

Area of Study / Keywords

Epilepsy Diffusion Tensor Imaging Temporal Lobe Epilepsy Hippocampal Sclerosis

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About

Dr. Donald Gross is currently appointed as Professor in the Department of Medicine in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry.

Clinical Interests

Epilepsy

Electroencephalography

Stereoelectroencephalography

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Research

Characterizing the extent of structural abnormalities in epilepsy: Over the course of the last 13 years, my primary research interest has been in using MRI to study the extent of structural changes in patients with epilepsy. Our highly sited methodology paper (Concha et al AJ Neurorad 2005- 256 citations) provided novel methods of extracting limbic white matter data.  In our Annals of Neurology paper from 2005 we demonstrated bilateral limbic white matter abnormalities in patients with unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy. This highly cited paper (246 citations) was one of the first papers to demonstrate extensive white matter abnormalities in patients with focal epilepsy (a concept that is now widely accepted). Since 2005 our group has continued to expand the understanding of the extent of structural changes in epilepsy and more recently we have begun to use graph theory to study changes in brain networks with our Gong et al. Cerebral Cortex 2008 paper having been cited 853 times. My international reputation in the field has also lead to collaborations with internationally regarded experts including researchers in Sao Paolo, Brazil (Epilepsy Research 2014), Campinos, Brazil (Epilepsia 2015a, Epilepsia 2015b) and Erlangen, Germany (NeuroImage 2017).

Validation of In vivo MRI techniques: While in vivo MRI is routinely used to make assumptions regarding the structural properties of the brain, there is a tremendous lack of knowledge regarding the structural changes associated with widely utilized MRI modalities. Our NeuroImage paper from 2006 (271 Citations) was the first to demonstrate time dependent diffusion MRI changes that were consistent with animal models. Our Journal of Neuroscience paper from 2010 (181 Citations) was the first to correlate in vivo diffusion MRI changes with microstructural changes using electron microscopy. We have subsequently studied time dependent MRI changes following temporal lobe epilepsy surgery (Liu et al. NeuroImage 2013, Elliott et al. Epilepsy Research 2016 and Elliott et al. Epilepsy Research 2018).  This work provides critical insight into our understanding of the underlying structural correlates of MRI.

Hippocampal subfield segmentation:While hippocampal subfield evaluation with in vivo MRI is a rapidly growing field of neuroscience, previous segmentation protocols have not been validated with histology. We have developed a novel segmentation method and have demonstrated improved accuracy of our method compared to other commonly used protocols based on direct comparison to the gold standard histological segmentation (NeuroImage 2017).

American Epilepsy Society Annual Meeting. 2021 December;