PI: Kamil Ugurbil
Institution: University of Minnesota

Overview:

State-of-the-art imaging acquisition technologies are revolutionizing how we can view and monitor the brain, throughout healthy aging, disease progression, and medical intervention. The project centers around the collection of new and advanced brain imaging data, particularly high resolution structural T1-weighted and diffusion MRI at a previously unimaginable level of detail for in-vivo imaging. These powerful technologies being developed will eventually take precedence over current acquisition protocols and eventually become standard protocols for brain imaging in clinical research. However, before such advancements can propagate to the neuropsychiatric research community at large, the validity and utility of the scans must be proven. Should an advanced imaging sequence fail to detect known biological effects, such as temporal atrophy in Alzheimer’s, or show minimal improvements in disease classification despite a much higher cost in acquisition time, the acquisition protocols would require modifications before being adopted.