WM & Vascular Health

White matter — the brain's network of myelinated axonal pathways — is highly sensitive to vascular insults, making it a critical imaging target for studying aging and disease. The IRIS Lab investigates the interplay between white matter microstructural integrity (measured via diffusion MRI), white matter perfusion (measured via ASL), and white matter hyperintensities (WMH), which are markers of small vessel disease visible on conventional MRI. The lab has shown that aging and vascular risk factors such as hypertension are associated with both microstructural degradation and altered perfusion in white matter, and that these changes predict cognitive outcomes independently of gray matter findings. Improved automated WMH detection methods developed in the lab further enable large-scale, reproducible assessment of white matter disease burden across clinical cohorts.