With BRAIN Initiative funding, the Wald Group seeks to enhance sensitivity of human brain mapping methods

September 30, 2014

 

The National Institutes of Health announced today its first wave of grants awarded through the White House's BRAIN Initiative. Among them is a project led by the Martinos Center's Larry Wald.

The project will advance the initiative's goals of using innovating neuroimaging technologies to develop a revolutionary new dynamic picture of the brain. The Wald Group plans to adopt the newly developed Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI) method to directly detect the concentration increase of iron oxide nanoparticles in the blood that accompanies neuronal activation. Substituting this novel magnetometer-based detection method for the commonly used MRI-based measure of iron oxide concentration (which is insensitive and indirect) offers an opportunity to significantly increase the sensitivity of hemodynamic-based human brain mapping.

"We are really excited to have an opportunity to pursue the feasibility of next-generation human functional imaging modalities such as this one, which we feel has a great deal of potential but many unknowns, making it difficult to fund with conventional NIH mechanisms," said Wald, an associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital, and director of the MGH NMR Core at the Center.

"To approach our goal, we have gathered together a team of talented engineers and physicists here at MGH, with expertise in functional imaging methodology development, and also partnered with co-PIs from the two institutions in North America with the most direct MPI instrumentation expertise: Prof. Steve Conolly at the Universiity of California, Berkeley, and Prof. Mark Griswold at Case Western Reserve."

Read more about the new NIH awards here.