Roland Beisteiner, a specialist in neurology and psychiatry at the Department of Neurology, took up a professorship (§99/1) in the field of Neurology at MedUni Vienna at the beginning of April.
Roland Beisteiner conducts research in the field of non-invasive fuctional brain diagnostics and functional brain therapy. He published the first work on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in the Alpine region and used it to develop a new method for functional brain diagnostics - particularly for pre-surgical use. fMRI uses special MR sequences to visualise changes in blood oxygenation associated with blood flow changes, which allows inferences about local brain activity and the functional networking of brain regions. FMRI is now a standard tool in the field of clinical neurosciences.
Based on fMRI functional brain diagnostics, Roland Beisteiner developed the first international procedure for ultrasound-based functional brain therapy (TPS, Transcranial Pulse Stimulation) from around 2010. TPS uses short ultrasound pulses in the microsecond range to activate brain cells and trigger neuroplastic regeneration processes. Based on individual MR images of the brain, this brain stimulation technique allows non-invasive stimulation of deep areas of the brain for the first time, as well as a targeting accuracy in the range of a few millimetres. The procedure has already been clinically approved for the treatment of Alzheimer’s dementia. Since its first publication in 2019, the Viennese therapy method has spread rapidly and now has more than 150 research and therapy centres worldwide.
About the person
Roland Beisteiner studied medicine and music in Ulm, Freiburg, London and Vienna. He is a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the Medical University of Vienna and a qualified concert cellist. Roland Beisteiner is a founding member and long-standing president of the Austrian Society for fMRI (ÖGfMRT) and of the Alpine Chapter of the international Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM, Minneapolis, USA). His development of the Transcranial Pulse Stimulation TPS was nominated for the Austria Gala "Austrian of the Year". As part of the professorship, the new methods for non-invasive functional brain diagnostics and brain therapy are to be further developed in an application-orientated scientific manner.
