On 16th November 2023, our Brain, Language, and Behaviour (BLB) lab team held a cross-disciplinary study day at our collaborating NHS site at Southmead Hospital. A meeting of minds covering neurosurgery, speech and language therapy (SLT), palliative care, as well as linguistics and psychology, our group spent the morning digging deeper into the background to our wide-ranging projects, their common aims, and progress.
The day started with Neil Barua, Lead Consultant Neurosurgeon at Southmead, explaining how brain tumour patients’ best interests are prioritised throughout the entire process of awake brain surgery. Madeline Farrow, an SLT at Southmead, then presented her current practices for testing language functions before, during, and after surgeries with patients; identifying critical areas where the BLB team can make a real difference to patient outcomes and their quality of life. This led to individual presentations on research progress by the BLB lab’s three PhD students: Hajira Mumtaz, Sonia Mariotti, and Tom Williamson. We ended with Anna Piasecki’s vision for the BLB lab as its lead, who also holds posts as Associate Professor of Psycholinguistics and Director of Research and Enterprise at UWE, charting a course for future world-leading innovation at the intersection of interdisciplinary academic expertise and clinical practice.
To round off the day, several team members donned the virtual reality headsets that clinical teams use to visualise the exact size and location of a patient’s tumour prior to the surgery and to prepare their surgical removal approach! This technology relies on diffusion tensor imaging, which maps brain connections and shows the neurosurgeons exactly where a brain tumour is. It was truly enlightening for BLB team members to see images up-close of brain tissue that our research aims to better understand and preserve.