Welcome to the Dickerson Lab: High Resolution Amygdala Imaging
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We recently reported a relationship, in normal younger and older adults, between the size of the amygdala and the size of a person's "social network," or how many people they interact with on a regular basis. This study in Nature Neuroscience of amygdala size and social networks was reported in over 500 news outlets, including Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, the BBC, The Guardian, and the Associated Press. See also the Northeastern University news story.
We continue to pursue the development, enhancement, and application of new methods for imaging and measuring aspects of the structure, function, and connectivity of a variety of human brain structures, including the amygdala, at unprecedented levels of detail.
Since mid-2005, we have undertaken a collaborative development project with investigators in the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and MIT, generously supported in part by the P41 NCRR resource grant, in which we are developing, validating, and applying methods for fMRI studies at resolutions as high as 1mm isotropic (3T) and 0.95mm isotropic (7T) and structural MRI studies at resolutions of 500um isotropic and 380um in-plane (3T and 7T). An essential part of these studies are the ultrahigh-resolution collaborative team (see "People"). Work is ongoing with local and distant collaborators to share methods as they are being developed.
With our collaborator Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett and colleagues, we are developing a novel method for the segmentation of the amygdala and its subregions using ultra-high resolution data collected on cognitively intact younger and older individuals.
Click on this link to download a high resolution version of the image at left.