Sponsored by the UCLA Brain Mapping Center Faculty
The focus of these talks is on advancing the use of brain mapping methods in neuroscience with an emphasis on contemporary issues of neuroplasticity, neurodevelopment, and biomarker development in neuropsychiatric disease.
Hosted By: Danny JJ Wang, Ph.D., Neurology, UCLA
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Essa Yacoub, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Radiology Center for Magnetic Resonance Research University of Minnesota |
The Human Connectome Project (HCP) aims to generate the most complete and accurate description of connections between gray matter locations in the human brain. State of the art imaging technologies have been specifically developed and optimized for the HCP in order to generate the highest quality data in the most efficient manner, and robustly across hundreds of community subjects. The imaging techniques were optimized for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and diffusion MRI (dMRI). This development has been focused on 2D slice accelerated multiband (MB) acquisitions, which is becoming the default approach for fMRI and dMRI studies. Several fold reductions in the repetition time (TR), without significant losses in signal to noise, have made its use extremely attractive. In addition, MB acquisitions have been shown to be useful for: obtaining higher resolution images, extrapolation of temporal information in fMRI, physiological noise sampling, reduction of scan times, collection of multiple echo times, arterial spin labeling, sound reduction for auditory fMRI, and even routine anatomical imaging. It is likely that nearly all future applications of fMRI and dMRI will use slice accelerations. Current efforts aim to deal with technological challenges, image quality optimizations, and application to higher fields.
