Dr. Sheikh-Bahaei is a double board-certified physician in internal medicine and radiology with subspecialty training in neuroradiology. She received her M.D. from Tehran University of Medical Sciences and her PhD on Alzheimer’s disease (AD) imaging from University of Cambridge, U.K. Her PhD was a multimodality imaging study focusing on positron emission tomography (PET), MR spectroscopy (MRS) and susceptibility weighted imaging (SWI) in AD, funded by National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).
Dr. Sheikh-Bahaei’s main research interest is the imaging biomarkers for diagnosis and prognosis of different neurodegenerative diseases and dementias utilizing advanced MRI techniques and PET scans with various tracers for metabolism, amyloid and tau. She is currently a Co-Investigator in the imaging core of Alzheimer’s disease research center (ADRC) at USC and working on different imaging cohorts at Laboratory of Neuroimaging (LONI) and ADRC. Her active research studies are:
• Neurodegenerative diseases including AD, Primary Progressive aphasia and PDD/DLB.
a. Synaptic function in Alzheimer’s disease and its association with amyloid beta and tau proteins.
b. Interaction between the level of different neurotransmitters measured by MRS and function and density of synapses and their relationship with tractography in AD.
c. Development of new tracers for AD and other dementias and optimizing the production of current tracers and improving the quality of PET images and establishing a semi-automated high-quality quantitative PET analysis system.
• The role of microvascular changes (i.e. cerebral microbleeds, perivascular spaces and white matter changes) in different neurological disorders including:
a. Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias: investigating the interaction between vascular changes and proteinopathy in AD. She was involved in developing an automated software for quantification of perivascular spaces at USC and currently working on a new atlas for normal and abnormal distribution of perivascular spaces across the life span.
b. Migraine and other headaches, using 7T MRI to investigate the microvascular changes, perfusion and functional alteration in different types of Migraine.
c. Normal pressure hydrocephalus, Idiopathic intracranial hypertension and Spontaneous intracranial hypotension; investigating the glymphatic system and perivascular spaces and the role of CSF clearance in various disorders associated with CSF flow impairment