Andreas is a clinician scientist with interest in neuroimaging, methods development, movement disorders and invasive brain stimulation.
The goal of his research is to analyse and modulate brain networks to improve clinical treatment – predominantly in the movement disorders spectrum.
The primary tools he has used to pursue these goals are structural imaging (MR/CT) and noninvasive connectivity measures derived from functional and diffusion weighted MRI.
Scientific focus
Andreas has spent the last five years including a PhD on developing and improving methods to analyse brain stimulation sites and how their whole brain effects are mediated via distributed structural and functional networks. To facilitate this work, he developed an openly available software toolbox to localise deep brain stimulation electrode placement based on postoperative imaging (lead-dbs.org / leadsuite.io). The software is now developed by a multi-institutional team and is used by over one thousand scientists on all continents (>7000 downloads). The software was awarded by the Max Rubner Prize of Stiftung Charité, the Robert Koch Prize of Charité Berlin and an Academic Ventures grant of Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies.
Further scientific contributions include estimating and validating normative brain connectomes – i.e. “average wiring diagrams” of the human brain. These atlases describe which area is how strongly connected to which other areas of the brain. Over the years, we have created several – they are all freely available to the scientific community and were applied in a context where subject- or patient-specific connectograms are not available.
Publications
Andreas published in peer-reviewed international journals such as Annals of Neurology, Brain, PNAS, Biological Psychiatry, NeuroImage and Human Brain Mapping.
Scientific studies Andreas contributed to were featured in news outlets such as Nature Reviews Neurology (Editorial section), n-tv, Der Spiegel, Focus (Cover page) as well as national TV / radio reports (SWR, Discovery News, hr-1, hr-INFO).