"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."
Support from the National Science Foundation will enable Drs. Ellen Grant and Yoshio Okada at Children's Hospital Boston (CHB) and Dr Matti Hämäläinen at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) to develop a novel magnetoencephalography (MEG) system, babyMEG, optimized for the non-invasive study of human brain development from premature babies up to children 3 years old. This new instrument will be developed under the direction of Dr. Okada in collaboration with an R&D company (Tristan Technologies) in San Diego, CA. The software for data analysis will be developed by Dr. Hämäläinen. Once completed, the instrument will be installed in a novel clinical/research facility that CHB has committed to build next to the Neonatal and Pediatric Intensive Care Units (NICU and PICU). The PI of this project (Dr. Grant) will oversee the use of the babyMEG in this facility as its Center Director.
This babyMEG is transformative because it will have a tremendous impact on the understanding of early brain development in humans. Users will be able to measure cortical activity with an unprecedented level of sensitivity and spatial resolution: high-resolution information about regional cortical activity in real time in the developing brain will become available. This information will allow evaluation of developing functional brain connectivity with acquisition of new skills such as language and determination of how developing connectivity is altered by disease.
The new research facility where this work will be carried out will be equipped with other neuroimaging tools such as a state-of-the-art 3 Tesla MR scanner with custom-built 32-channel head coils and a novel Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) system. Thus, the babyMEG will be part of a multimodal neuroimaging facility. The proximity of the research center to the NICU and PICU is unique in the world. This infrastructure will provide exciting opportunities for understanding human brain development in health and disease and for eventually helping to maximize the potential of babies with various brain disorders.
It is anticipated that the support from the NSF will help to create a unique research center that will become an important hub for research, training and education not only in this country, but also in the world. The center will be used for training of postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students as well junior faculty from engineering and neuroscience. The babyMEG in the clinical environment will expose basic scientists to the real world problems and questions of early brain development and clinicians to the relevance of basic science methods. The babyMEG will promote not only interdisciplinary research but also collaboration between multiple Harvard institutions including CHB, MGH, MIT and Harvard Medical School as well as their collaborators worldwide. Specific benefits to graduate education will focus on training students to research scientific questions drawing on advice and guidance from the three co-PIs and senior faculty members who will be using the facility in collaboration with the three key leaders. Use of the babyMEG will be promoted through regular hands-on teaching sessions, seminar series and public lectures.
This was a project to develop a novel instrument for measuring and imaging the electrical activity of human brain completely non-invasively and safely, but with sufficient sensitivity and spatial resolution to provide new information useful for advancing our understanding of functional development of the human brain. In collaboration with a small business organization in USA specialized in construction of biomagnetic instruments (Tristan Technologies, inc., San Diego, CA), we have designed and constructed a pediatric magnetoencephalography (MEG) system, which we call "babyMEG", for measuring the electrophysiological activity of human brain. This is a whole-head MEG system capable of measuring brain activity all around the cerebral cortex and cerebellum. We designed the instrument to be sensitive enough to measure cortical activity in real time with a level of spatial resolution sufficiently high for visualizing interactions among different regions of the cortex in real time with a millisecond resolution. To achieve these capabilities, we have designed a novel sensor array having 375 magnetic field sensors with a very high sensor density very close to the head. Professor Okada, who is responsible for this project, in collaboration with Tristan has completed the assembly of this system in May of 2014 and the testing of its operation in August of 2014 at Tristan. Tristan has shipped the babyMEG in September of 2014 to the new MEG Laboratory in the new building adjacent to the main hospital of Boston Children’s Hospital. Figure 1 shows the babyMEG installed in this facility. It is designed as a clinical facility capable of accepting inpatients for diagnosing brain functions. Our initial testing has shown that most of the sensors (>96%) are working at the level quite close to the specifications Dr. Okada provided 5 years ago when this project was proposed the NSF for financial support. We are working with the team led by Professor Matti Hämäläinen of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Martinos Center to install the software for data acquisition and analysis. Dr. Hämäläinen is the PI of the grant awarded to the MGH Martinos Center as part of this collaborative effort. In collaboration with Dr. Hämäläinen, we have developed a software for removing the environmental magnetic field noise, so that brain activity can be clearly measured. The initial installation of this software will be completed by December of 2015. We are currently working with a company called Cryomech, inc. in Syracuse, NY, to install a 100% helium recycling system in the MEG system so that we can eliminate the waste of helium, which is a precious natural resource, consistent with the call for Green energy technology in the original ARRA program. This closed-loop helium recycler will be installed in February of 2015. In summary, we have successfully developed a novel pediatric MEG system that will most likely provide new understanding of human brain functions and development. During the coming months we will start the evaluation of the system in newborns, infants and children, eventually applying this instrument for diagnosis of pediatric patients with various neuronal disorders.
