Bruce Pike, Ph.D.

Professor -

As of September 2013, Dr. Bruce Pike will be on leave of absence from McGill, with a position as Chair in Healthy Brain Aging in the Campus Alberta Innovates Program (CAIP).

Dr. Bruce Pike is Killam Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery, James McGill Professor of Biomedical Engineering and a Chercheur Nationaux of the Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec. Dr. Pike investigates magnetic resonance imaging methods and applications for basic and clinical neuroscience research. As his primary focus, he detects and measures the physiological modulations that are associated with fluctuations in neuronal activity using functional MRI. Functional MRI can detect changes in blood oxygenation and tissue perfusion with a high temporal and spatial resolution. It also provides a powerful tool for studying basic brain physiology in healthy subjects and pathophysiology in diseases such as stroke and Alzheimer’s Disease.Recently, Dr. Pike used his novel functional MRI methods to determine for the first time the relationship between regional cerebral blood flow and oxygen consumption in the cortex over a broad range of activation and inhibition conditions in both healthy subjects and epilepsy patients. Dr. Pike has also developed a quantitative MRI technique termed magnetization transfer (MT) imaging that probes the magnetic interaction between macromolecules and water of brain tissue. Using MT imaging, his group has revealed focal pathology in a group of multiple sclerosis patients that precedes the development of conventional MRI detected MS lesions by up to two years.