Searching the Resource Information Network
Are you sure you want to leave this community? Leaving the community will revoke any permissions you have been granted in this community.
The Center for Magnetic Resonance (CMRR) at the University of Minnesota was one of the laboratories where the work that simultaneously and independently introduced functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of human brain activity was carried out. However, unlike other laboratories pursuing fMRI at the time, our work was performed at 4T magnetic field and coincided with the effort to push human magnetic resonance imaging to field strength significantly beyond 1.5T which was the high-end standard of the time. The human fMRI experiments performed in CMRR were planned between two colleagues who had known each other and had worked together previously in Bell Laboratories, namely Seiji Ogawa and myself, immediately after the Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent (BOLD) contrast was developed by Seiji. We were waiting for our first human system, a 4T system, to arrive in order to attempt at imaging brain activity in the human brain and these were the first experiments we performed on the 4T instrument in CMRR when it became marginally operational. This was a prelude to a subsequent systematic push we initiated for exploiting higher magnetic fields to improve the accuracy and sensitivity of fMRI maps, first going to 9.4T for animal model studies and subsequently developing a 7T human system for the first time. Steady improvements in high field instrumentation and ever expanding armamentarium of image acquisition and engineering solutions to challenges posed by ultrahigh fields have brought fMRI to submillimeter resolution in the whole brain at 7T, the scale necessary to reach cortical columns and laminar differentiation in the whole brain. The solutions that emerged in response to technological challenges posed by 7T also propagated and continues to propagate to lower field clinical systems, a major advantage of the ultrahigh fields effort that is underappreciated. Further improvements at 7T are inevitable. Further translation of these improvements to lower field clinical systems to achieve new capabilities and to magnetic fields significantly higher than 7T to enable human imaging is inescapable.
Pubmed ID: 22333670
Publication data is provided by the National Library of Medicine ® and PubMed ®. Data is retrieved from PubMed ® on a weekly schedule. For terms and conditions see the National Library of Medicine Terms and Conditions.
Project to map the neural pathways that underlie human brain function for several modalities of neuroimaging data including fMRI. The purpose of the Project is to acquire and share data about the structural and functional connectivity of the human brain. It will greatly advance the capabilities for imaging and analyzing brain connections, resulting in improved sensitivity, resolution, and utility, thereby accelerating progress in the emerging field of human connectomics. Altogether, the Human Connectome Project will lead to major advances in the understanding of what makes us uniquely human and will set the stage for future studies of abnormal brain circuits in many neurological and psychiatric disorders. The sixteen institutes and centers of the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience have funded two major grants that will take complementary approaches to deciphering the brain's amazingly complex wiring diagram. An 11-institution consortium led by Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Minnesota received a 5-year grant to enable development and utilization of advanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) methods to chart brain circuitry. A consortium led by Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of California at Los Angeles received a grant to enable building and refining a next-generation 3T MR scanner that improves the quality and spatial resolution with which brain connectivity data can be acquired at this field strength.
View all literature mentions