We are pleased to announce that Dr. Alex McClanahan, a PGY-4 in Radiology, has been selected as the recipient of the 2026 Howard J. Barnhard, M.D. Radiology Resident Research Endowment Seed Grant Award! This grant award will provide up to $10,000 in one year to Dr. McClanahan for him to complete his proposed project, entitled “Automated Image Guidance for Endovascular Brain-Computer Interface Placement”. In this project, Dr. McClanahan aims to develop and validate an automated pipeline that segments the superior sagittal sinus from magnetic resonance venography and projects venous target markers onto lateral fluoroscopic images. If successful, this automated segmentation and cross-modality co-registration tool can achieve high accuracy while reducing variability and processing time when planning venous implantation of electrodes for endovascular brain-computer interfaces. Dr. McClanahan will be paired with a clinical mentor, Dr. Shobhit Sharma, and will report project progress to Dr. Xiawei Ou, to ensure successful completion of this project.
We are committed to fostering a strong culture of research within our department, to promoting innovative and impactful research, and to increasing research productivity and visibility. Dr. McClanahan’s project is just one example of many exciting research activities going on in our department. We continue to encourage our faculty, fellows, and residents to increase research activity. We will develop more infrastructure and provide more resources to promote research within our department, including another seed grant award opportunity for faculty members in the near future.