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Innovative design achieves tenfold better resolution for functional MRI brain imaging
Higher resolution will allow neuroscientists to more precisely localize and trace brain networks
Bernhard Gruber, Massachusetts General Hospital & Harvard University The improved resolution will help neuroscientists probe the neuronal circuits in different regions of the brain's neocortex and allow researchers to track signals propagating from one area of the cortex to another as we think and reason, and perhaps discover underlying causes of developmental disorders. With the higher spatial resolution, neuroscientists will be able to home in on the activity of something on the order of 850 individual neurons within a single voxel — a 3D pixel — instead of the 600,000 recorded with standard hospital MRIs, said Silvia Bunge, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology who is one of the first to use the NexGen 7T to conduct research on a human brain. Mathias Davids, then a physics graduate student at Heidelberg University in Mannheim, Germany, and a member of Feinberg’s team, collaborated with Dietz in performing physiologic modeling to allow a faster gradient slew rate — a measure of how quickly the magnetic field changes across the brain — while remaining under the neuronal stimulation thresholds of the human body.
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