Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Dr. Tie is an Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School. Dr. Tie received her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Louisiana Tech University. Dr. Tie's research focuses on improving brain mapping for surgical planning and guidance by developing multi-modal neuroimaging techniques, focusing on functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI and diffusion MRI. She has developed easy to perform resting state and movie watching fMRI paradigms for the patients who cannot perform regular task based fMRI due to language or other neurological deficits. Dr. Tie is also interested in applying brain connectivity to understand the neural mechanism of disease pathophysiology and develop biomarkers for neurological disorders. The goals are to inform therapeutic development and improve patients’ overall well-being.

Projects:
1) Presurgical Language Mapping with Task-based functional MRI (fMRI)
Presurgical language mapping with task-based functional MRI (fMRI) is critical for surgical planning and intra-operative guidance to preserve language function in patients with brain lesions close to language areas. We have worked on improving task-based fMRI by optimizing fMRI task design, applying advanced biomedical signal and image processing techinques, and studying the sex effect on language mapping results.

2) Easy-to-perform fMRI Brain Mapping Paradigms
For neurosurgical patients who cannot perform regular task-based fMRI due to language or other neurological deficits, we have developed easy-to-perform fMRI brain mapping paradigms, i.e., resting-state and movie-watching fMRI. We have demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of these paradigms in mapping language areas in individual healthy subjects and neurosurgical patients.

3) Combination of Functional and Diffusion MRI for Brain Mapping
Combination of functional MRI (fMRI) and diffusion MRI (dMRI) can provide critical information of both important cortical areas as well as subcortical white matter tracts that are essential to surgical planning and guidance.

4) Clinical Utility Study of fMRI and Intraoperative MRI

5) Brain Mapping with Functional Magnetic Resonance Elastography (fMRE)

6) Brain Connectivity Studies in Patients with Neurological Disorders
Functional connectivity is a powerful tool to study brain network changes in neurological disorders. We have applied functional connectivity approaches for (a) language mapping in brain tumor patients and (b) studying altered brain networks in patients with multiple sclerosis, prolactinomas, and lesional peduncular hallucinosis.

• Functional Brain Imaging, Functional MRI, Surgical Planning, Language Mapping