Our research programme leverages two decades of advancements in magnetic resonance imaging and assocaited methodologies to accrue the evidence to inform the difficult discussions with patients with brain tumours, and their families, on the balance between extending life and preserving cognition; a very personal decison. 

Although conventional MRI is a fundamental clinical tool for brain tumour diagnosis and monitoring, the spatially extended topography of brain networks sub-serving cognition makes predicting functional impairments challenging. We have previously shown that focal brain tumours produce long-range gradients in function, and consequently that their effects require interpretation in terms of changes in functional network architecture. We have also discovered that the spatial distribution of brain tumours is largely explained by brain regions that are the connections between networks that are highly metabolically active, express genes for metabolic processes, cell division and gliomagenesis, and are co-located with progenitor cells, and that  increasing space occupancy of tumours exerts a detrimental effect on memory following treatment by its perturbation of the associated functional network. Together, this evidence leads us to believe that the type and severity of tumour- and treatment-induced cognitive deficits is dependent on which network, and specifically which components of the network, interact with the tumour.