The project will provide an extendable, open hardware/software solution for functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRi) of cortical activity. It will integrate commercial products and university developed tools to provide a reliable, documented, supported, and low-cost way of adding fMRI to an existing MRI site. The research involves developing: 1) robust fMRI paradigms for visual, motor, language driving, visual mapping, working memory, and language mapping; 2) hardware and software to support event- related fMRI paradigms with millisecond timing resolution; 3) hardware and software to monitor and compensate for cardiac and respiration effects; 4) a protocol specification system that generates recommended pulse sequence parameters for fMRI studies; 3) an open-architecture JAVA-based wrapper to connect fMRI analysis tools; 6) a computerized laboratory notebook system to organize and maintain analysis images, specifications and researcher commentaries; and 7) a region of interest (ROI) database management system to allow particle-based queries and summaries of fMRI results. This research will produce a commercial integrated system for fMRI by the end of the project. The widespread accessibility of these new techniques will lead to a substantial acceleration in the growth of our understanding of cortical function by facilitating research involved in understanding brain function and mental disorders.
This will provide an integrated system for brain imaging for research and clinical brain activation mapping. Anticipated benefits include cognitive assessment, brain mapping and treatment of brain disorders.
| Drobyshevsky, Alexander; Baumann, Stephen B; Schneider, Walter (2006) A rapid fMRI task battery for mapping of visual, motor, cognitive, and emotional function. Neuroimage 31:732-44 |
