Research project

Child Brain Lab

Status: Ongoing project

The Child Brain Lab is a testing facility for brain development and brain function of children who have a condition affecting the head, brain, or senses. The gathered multimodal data is used to improve clinical care and to establish developmental growth curves, thereby providing a solid infrastructure for evaluating new techniques and interventions. The Child Brain Lab provides a linking pin between value-based healthcare and scientific research.

What we do

About our project

Background

Brain development affects all aspects of life. Abnormal brain function in children has great consequences for cognition, behavior and social interactions. To facilitate optimal brain development in children with brain-related disorders, professionals of the Erasmus MC Sophia Children's Hospital merge their expertise to form the Pediatric Brain Center. We are combining clinical care and research to generate developmental growth curves in relevant domains, to study new treatments, to develop innovative and meaningful outcome measures and to rapidly translate findings to these children.

Child Brain Lab

The Child Brain Lab is a core facility within this network. Here, we measure multiple metrics of brain structure and function of children with neurologic or psychiatric disorders or disorders of head and senses. We follow children longitudinally, from 0-18 years of age. Data is systematically collected in a child-friendly manner. Results are directly embedded in a personalised-medicine framework for use in daily clinical care, and stored in an anonymized way for research. Including children with a range of brain disorders builds a cohort that allows cross-disorder analyses, as well as fertilization of knowledge and treatment between different disorders.

Mission

Our mission is to ensure that all children with a brain disorder can participate in society at the best possible level.

Our research focus

Our aims

We aim at realizing three important targets in the Child Brain Lab:

Creating developmental curves for relevant and meaningful outcomes in children with brain disorders to enable early detection of an abnormal course and prediction of personalized trajectories. These curves will aid the design of intervention-trials.
Identify innovative biomarkers in early childhood to predict functional outcomes of children with brain-related disorders later in life.
Generate in-depth natural history information to add knowledge on the course of various syndromes and conditions and facilitate the design of future intervention studies.