This EAGER award funds an experiment to test the possibility of directly measuring neural activity in the human brain with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This project is led by Dr. Yoshio Okada, who is an Associate in Neurology at Children's Hospital in Boston and also a Clinical Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School.
In recent years, MRI has become a useful technique for non-invasively determining the anatomy of the brain and its axonal fiber connections. MRI has also been very useful for estimating functional activity of the human brain. Anatomical and functional studies of the human brain using MRI have also made important contributions to the understanding of the human body and have also been useful in clinical medicine. Unfortunately, MRI has been severely limited by the fact that these techniques estimate neuronal activity only indirectly. The PI of this proposal has developed a unique experimental arrangement which is ideally suited for testing the possibility of directly measuring MRI signals due to the magnetic field produced by neuronal activity without any time delay. Funding through the EAGER program will therefore enable the PI and his collaborators to solidly establish their preliminary findings in the isolated intact cerebellum of the turtle. This will thereby provide ways to test the basic concepts of neural current MRI without the contaminations that would otherwise arise due to blood flow and other difficulties.
This research is also expected to have significant broader impacts. Because this work will refine experimental investigations into the neural functioning of the human brain, it has many direct implications not only for basic research but also for clinical medicine. The proposed work will also provide valuable training in experimental neurophysiology and MRI to a postdoctoral researcher with a PhD in biomedical engineering.
