Michael Hutchinson, MD, PhD
Dr. Hutchinson is a board-certified neurologist and senior faculty at the Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai, Manhattan. His clinical interests include headaches, dementia, concussion, traumatic brain injury (TBI), Parkinson's Disease, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, anxiety, and REM sleep disorders. He has an extensive scientific background and brings a science-based approach to solving clinical problems.
During his residency at the University of Washington, Hutchinson used his knowledge of chaos theory to propose a new way of treating status epilepticus, the most lethal form of epilepsy. The treatment proved successful and is now standard-of-care in the US. Hutchinson later did a sabbatical at Queen Square, London, where Ian McDonald was pioneering the use of beta interferon as the first treatment for multiple sclerosis.
After residency training, Hutchinson underwent a neuroimaging fellowship in Los Angeles.
After arriving at NYU in 1994, Hutchinson pioneered the use of cholinesterase inhibitors as a treatment for the dementia of Parkinson's disease. At the time this was considered forbidden because it might make the patient physically worse, but Hutchinson argued that this premise was ill-conceived. Today, cholineserase inhibitors are standard-of-care in Parkinson's dementia. Hutchinson later developed a new way of treating acute relapses in multiple sclerosis, which puts the patient in charge, and has yielded impressive long-term results.
During his time at NYU, Hutchinson made early contributions to functional MRI, discovering that regional brain activations during cognitive tasks are accompanied by widespread deactivations. In structural imaging, Hutchinson combined physics, neuropathology, and image processing to develop a robust MRI biomarker for Parkinson's disease.
In addition to certification in neurology, Hutchinson is certified in neuroimaging (MRI and CT of the brain and spine), which combines neuroanatomy, neuropathology, and neurophysiology, fields that form the unique base of clinical neurology.
Dr. Hutchinson holds a Ph.D. in molecular physics and is the inventor of spatial sensitivity encoding for MRI - sometimes referred to as parallel MRI - which is now the acknowledged standard for clinical MRI. He is currently exploring a possible extension of this to ultrafast imaging.
MRI is a technique for examining the central nervous system (brain and spine). EMG is a complementary technique used to examine the peripheral nervous system (nerve and muscle).
