Interventional Psychiatry Research Program

The Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) Interventional Psychiatry Research Program (IPRP) aims to develop and test procedural treatments for individuals with psychiatric illnesses who have not benefited from conventional psychotherapy and medications. Most of our work involves deriving, validating, and testing circuit-based  treatment targets for brain stimulation or neurosurgical ablation.

We derive treatment targets with lesion network mapping, a technique that leverages the human connectome (a wiring diagram of the human brain) to assess the functional connectivity patterns of brain lesion locations causally associated with psychiatric symptom onset or change. The coordinates of gray matter changes, functional neuroimaging peaks, and brain stimulation sites can also be mapped to brain networks using the human connectome, providing valuable insights into multimodal convergence.

We test treatment targets in close collaboration with the TMS clinic, the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics, and the Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital Interventional Psychiatry Service.