Based in Calgary but serving a much larger area, the Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI) is a partnership between the University of Calgary, the Calgary Health Region and the Canadian Centre of Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge. The institute’s membership consists of researchers and practitioners of various medical specialties. Among the approximately 150 members are neurologists, psychiatrists, radiologists and biomedical engineers. While the HBI is a research and education institution located at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary, many HBI members are also clinicians, offering clinical care to patients at the region’s largest hospital, the Foothills Medical Centre (FMC).

Foothills also houses the NRC Institute for Biodiagnostics–West, a satellite unit to Winnipeg’s IBD created in 2000. Institute for Biodiagnostics–West researchers, led by Dr. Bogusław (Sławek) Tomanek, were instrumental in the design and construction of the FMC’s experimental 9.4-tesla MRI system, and continue to be key to the centre’s varied research programs.

The HBI’s main research programs fall into three themes: brain repair and regeneration; neural cell signalling and mental health disorders; and high-tech brain imaging. Imaging work occurs mostly at the affiliated Seaman Family MR Research Centre. Within these broad categories, research at the HBI is quite diverse, and follows the researchers’ own varying interests. Current projects include rebuilding or repairing neural connections from damage caused by multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injuries and strokes; charting epilepsy through positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technologies; and robotic neuro-microsurgery. This latter field, led by Dr. Garnette Sutherland, has produced neuroArm, the world’s first MRI-compatible microsurgery robot. Sutherland’s team included several of the same NRC imaging researchers who produced the mobile surgical MRI unit that gave rise to IMRIS. IMRIS is profiled elsewhere in this issue; you can read more about Dr. Sutherland’s neuroArm in the summer edition of Medical Technology Watch, which will focus on robotics.

Other projects currently underway at the HBI are the Electron Axon Interface project, involving nerve regeneration with electronic chips; and therapies for overcoming movement disorders, such as Parkinson’s, with “brain pacemakers.” HBI member Dr. Zelma Kiss, who is also a clinician in the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the Foothills centre, has implanted dozens of these devices, many of them made by London, Ontario–based Medtrode.

These deep brain stimulators or pulse generators, as they are properly known, have also been used to treat depression. Though the results are generally positive and have sometimes eliminated the need for medication, scientists still do not understand the exact mechanism by which these devices function, so studies on this technology are ongoing.

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