Researchers Develop New Brain Scanner

A scientific team supported in part by NIH has developed a new, ultra-high-resolution brain imaging system that can reconstruct microscopic brain structures that are disrupted in neurological and neuropsychiatric brain disorders. The new system is a significant advance over conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners that cannot visualize these tiny but clinically important structures.

The system, called the Connectome 2.0 human MRI scanner, overcomes a significant hurdle for neuroscientists: to bridge different brain regions and probe tiny structures necessary to define the “connectome,” the complex matrix of structural connections between nodes in the nervous system, and to do it noninvasively in living humans.

The scanner is innovative in two major ways: it fits snugly around the heads of living people and it has many more channels than typical MRI systems. These advances greatly increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the system, providing much sharper images of very small biological brain structures than previously possible. These technical upgrades will enable scientists to map human brain fibers and cellular architecture down to nearly single-micron precision to study how subtle changes in cells and connections relate to cognition, behavior and disease.

In addition, the team showed the scanner was safe in healthy research volunteers, revealing subtle microstructural differences (individual axon diameter or cell size) between individual brains. Before this new system, this was only feasible in postmortem or animal studies.

This work is an important step toward developing a complete wiring diagram of the brain. It also opens the door for future advances in precision neuroscience, in which noninvasive brain stimulation may help treat brain disorders tailored to an individual’s unique brain circuitry.

The research was funded in part by The BRAIN Initiative®. It supports the BRAIN Initiative Connectivity Across Scales (BRAIN CONNECTS) program, which aims to develop the research capacity and technical capabilities to generate wiring diagrams that can span entire brains across multiple scales. The findings were reported in Nature Biomedical Engineering.