MRI-R2: Acquisition for High-Performance Imaging of the Human Brain

California Institute Of Technology, Pasadena CA

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This NSF Major Research Instrumentation (MRI-R2) Award will enable a three-year grant to purchase an upgrade for a single piece of equipment for imaging the human brain at the California Institute of Technology. The upgrade, a 32-channel Total Imaging Matrix upgrade of a Siemens 3.0 Tesla MRI scanner, will substantially improve the resolution, the speed with which experiments can be done, and the kinds of imaging sequences that can be programmed. Taken together, these major enhancements will enable a range of questions about the structure, connectivity, and functioning of the human brain. Researchers at Caltech, in collaboration with a national and international consortium of scientists, will use the equipment to investigate how the brain makes financial decisions, how social information such as faces are processed, and how brain-machine interfaces can be built to decipher information from the brain to guide robotic prostheses. These are important, big open questions in neuroscience, and the new equipment will greatly enhance science at the Caltech Brain Imaging Center. The grant will also provide opportunities for training of students and post-docs on the new equipment. This will include classes taught at Caltech as well as participation in individual research projects. The development of these new scientific tools will lead to a better understanding of how the brain works, how it is wired up, and how it may dysfunction in disease. That knowledge, in turn, will contribute to efforts to build artificially intelligent systems. Taken together, the cutting-edge science enabled by the new equipment, and the training of the next generation of young scientists on it, will contribute substantially to cognitive neuroscience in America and worldwide.