Project-004

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

From its inception, CAMRT has developed innovative neuroimaging methodology for use by our collaborators and service users as well as the community at large through dissemination and training. When we started doing fMRI research in 1993, our scanner did not have EPI-capable gradients, and we were forced to innovate. We found that spiral trajectories being developed by our colleagues in EE were highly efficient, and enabled us to collect excellent timeseries images with several shots instead of the 64 or more needed with conventional Cartesian methods. Thus, when CAMRT began in 1995 we continued to evolve innovative acquisition and analysis techniques, such as real-time fMRI and sparsely sampled acquisitions, driven by collaborators in the neurosciences and other cognitive biomedical fields. We demonstrated strong advantages to our spiral sequences over the more ubiquitous EPI techniques, and they are in use for tens of thousands of scans/year in our center and elsewhere. We became highly regarded by the extramural community for our technology (our top 5 fMRI papers in Google Scholar together have over 3000 citations), and have disseminated broadly. Building on our sound record of impact in fMRI and other neuroimaging methods for cognitive exploration, and motivated by investigators asking increasingly complex questions about the brain, we propose to develop fMRI acquisition techniques with higher spatiotemporal resolution, introduce highly novel array methods for neuromodulation of brain networks using both TMS and tDCS, and augment our DTI technology with new susceptibility weighted methods. These goals are highly consistent with the Grand Challenges in Neuroimaging identified by an NSF Workshop called in response to the BRAIN research initiative introduced by President Obama in 2013. We will also maintain our support of outside investigators through dissemination of pulse sequences, reconstruction methods and other software, and continue to train students and our users in state of the art neuroimaging technology.