In Vivo Brain Network Latency Connectome Mapping

National Institute Of Biomedical Imaging And Bioengineering, Bethesda

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

We are pleased with the progress we have made in this team building R24 grant which our group received through the NIH BRAIN Initiative. We have been informed that ours is the only group within the NIH IRP to have received such an award. First, NIBIB as our intramural sponsor, has been extremely supportive of our efforts to build a Dream Team of computational neuroscientists, computer scientists with an expertise in networks, clinical neurophysiologists, magnetoencephalographers, MRI clinical sequence programers, and bench neurobiologists. Last year, our group successfully received approval of our proposed clinical protocol to enable us to perform interdisciplinary studies on healthy subjects, providing sufficient information to measure elements of the latency matrix in vivo for the first time. Prior to that, we performed several 'ground truth' studies intended to test and vet our proposed latency connectome methodologies, in one case, comparing latency measurements in the peripheral nervous system (PNS), using neurophysiological techniques on well characterized nerves in the motor system, along with MRI, and in the central nervous system (CNS), using TMS as a means to trigger controlled excitations in the motor area, which we can compare with estimates furnished by MRI. This past year we have been focussed on vetting and validating the MRI method for measuring mean latencies and latency distributions. We have performed numerous clinical studies in the PNS of subjects testing the accuracy and precision of the MRI latency estimates with those obtained neurophysiologically on the same subject. Our hope is that with sufficient preliminary data, we can apply for a followup grant to migrate this approach clinically.