About
Lorella Battelli, Ph.D.
Battelli Lab - ReVISION
Investigating the effects of noninvasive brain stimulation on visual recovery post stroke.
Research Area
Stroke Recovery
Dr. Lorella Battelli is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School associated with the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She has a cognitive neuroscience and psychology background focused on enhancing and improving behavior. In particular, her current interests lie in the visual system's ability to recover post-stroke with targeted noninvasive brain stimulation and visual training.
The Blavatnik Institute has awarded Dr. Battelli with a grant to fund her clinical trial at the BIDMC under a protocol termed: Visual Restoration of Losses Caused by Cortical Damage: a New Protocol to Promote Fast Recovery. This clinical trial is actively recruiting patients with cortical damage caused by an ischemic stroke that has created a type of visual field deficit such as hemianopsia or quadrantanopia.
The study collects data on the impact of noninvasive brain stimulation or specifically transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) coupled with a visual training task on the recovery of visual behavior from cortical damage. The participants would be monitored for changes before and after the study with EEG, fMRI, and other visual discrimination tasks. The double-blinded study compares the recovery of the visual training with "sham" stimulation and actual tRNS.
You can find the study on clinicaltrials.gov.
If you or anyone you know suffers from visual field deficits post-stroke, please have them contact the research assistant Sabrina Pires, spires1@bidmc.harvard.edu or (617) 667-0258, for more information.
Principal Investigator
Lorella Battelli, Ph.D.
lbattell@bidmc.harvard.edu
Work in the lab focuses on the study of visual and attentional functions in the healthy and diseased brain. Specifically, we have performed studies of inter- and intra-hemispheric connectivity, its impairment in stroke and its recovery after noninvasive brain stimulation as therapeutic treatment. In addition to brain stimulation and behavioral measures, we perform fMRI of both intact and neurologically impaired subjects to study the physiological response after stimulation, and its correlation with behavior.
Our studies have established neuromodulation as a tool to boost cognitive functions in healthy subjects and in stroke patients. More recently, we have used direct current stimulation to dramatically improve visual functions in stroke patients affected by cortical blindness. This newly developed rehabilitation stimulation protocol for stroke patients is a work done in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Rochester (NY) and the Italian Institute of Technology in Italy.
