The creation of a Neuroscience Neuroimaging Center (NNC) at the University of Pennsylvania is proposed, in response to the NINDS Institutional Center Core Grants to Support Neuroscience Research Program Announcement. The NNC would provide support for technical aspects of neuroimaging using MRI, including experimental design, data acquisition, and image analysis, and would interface with several other complementary programs in brain, behavior, and imaging. The availability of the NNC would allow NINDS investigators and other neuroscientists, both with and without specific funding and expertise in neuroimaging, to easily carry out state-of-the-art experiments based on their hypotheses of interest. This would be expected to facilitate the usage of neuroimaging in neuroscience research, and to greatly improve the quality and sophistication of neuroimaging experiments. The proposed NNC would benefit from an extraordinarily rich neuroimaging Neuroscience research environment at the University of Pennsylvania, and would provide support and consolidation of technical skills and expertise in neuroimaging. The following Core modules are proposed: An Administrative Core will provide oversight for the NNC, and will be guided by a Steering Committee comprised of Core Directors and Principal Investigators of user projects, An MRI Scanning Core will provide technical support and consultation for pulse sequence selection, design, and implementation, and for implementing approaches for ancillary methods such as physiological monitoring and gating, neuropsychological task design, and behavioral response monitoring. A Morphology and Statistics Core will provide consultation and customization for experimental design and data analysis approaches, including brain segmentation and region of interest analysis, normalization, statistical modeling, and power analysis and thresholding. A Data Analysis Facility will maintain state-of-the-art data processing facilities with distributed computing, storage and back-up, and seamless integration of several data analysis software environments and will implement customized analysis methods developed by the Morphology and Statistics Core.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 161 publications
