"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.
The goal of this project was to produce software for a whole-head "BabyMEG" magnetoencephalography (MEG) system which measures brain activity in real time from infants. The hardware for this system was developed under NSF support at Children's Hospital Boston (CHB). The BabyMEG system can be used to understand how the healthy brain works and develops in infancy in terms of timing of brain activity and the functional connectivity between diffferent regions of the brain. The BabyMEG can be also used to understand the origins of brain malfunction in neurological diseases, e.g., epilepsy. This unique instrument is part of a multi-modal infant brain imaging center at CHB. With all functional imaging modalities presented, this facility is unique within the US. At the end of the project period, the BabyMEG software was ready to acquire and analyze data from the BabyMEG hardware, which will be install at CHB be used in the new hardware, which will be installed at CHB during spring 2014. The support from the NSF helped to create a unique research center that will become an important hub for research, training and education not only in this country, but also all over the world. 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 as well as their collaborators worldwide.
