Guest blog post by Dr Anna Piasecki, Director of Research and Enterprise (School of Social Sciences)
On 16th November 2023, the UWE Bristol Brain, Language, and Behaviour (BLB) lab team held a cross-disciplinary study day with its clinical collaborators 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 patients’ lives. 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 see inside patients’ brains pre-surgery to strategize tumour removal! 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.
BLB is an interdisciplinary team of staff and student researchers, working closely with the clinical team at Southmead Hospital in Bristol, to develop comprehensive and novel language tests that are used during awake brain surgeries. Their tests help to ensure that the communication abilities of brain tumour patients can be preserved in the wake of their brain surgery, which impacts the patients’ quality of life and survival.