Calcium-based MRI sensor enables enhanced brain imaging

New sensors monitor brain activity and blood flow deeper in the brain with high sensitivity and high speed

 [ link ]

Distinct stages of thinking revealed by brain activity patterns

Using neuroimaging data, Carnegie Mellon University researchers have identified four distinct stages of math problem solving.

[ more ] [ paper ]

Human Intelligence Through Brain Scans

Researchers at Yale led a study that demonstrate fluid intelligence (defined by abstract reasoning) can be measured by the functional connectivity of 268 specific brain regions. Emily Finn, co-author of this study, said, “The more certain regions are talking to one another, the better you’re able to process information quickly and make inferences.” Mostly, fluid intelligence had to do with the connections between the frontal and parietal lobes. The stronger and swifter the communication between these two regions, the better one’s score in the abstract thinking test.Earlier, same researchers have demonstrated that a person’s brain activity appears to be as unique as his or her fingerprints. Using brain imaging data, researcher were able to identify individuals.

[ more ] [ earlier ]

Schizophrenia and the Teenage Brain: How Can Imaging Help?

Adolescence is a dangerous time for the onset of mental health problems. Advances in brain imaging are helping to picture how neural changes in these crucial years can lead to chronic debilitating mental illness.

[ more ]

Mapping brain activity with molecular precision

A new technique allows neuroscientists to precisely track neural communication in the brain over time, using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) along with a specialized molecular MRI contrast agent.

[ more ]

Seeing How Your Brain Works in Real-time Helps to Improve It

In an experiment involving twenty volunteers with contamination anxiety, researchers from Yale University tested whether real-time neurofeedback can induce lasting changes in brain activity. Contamination anxiety is related to hyperactivity in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a region of the brain thought to be involved in mood control and decision making. Showing the volunteers the activity in their OFC in a line-graph helped them to control their brain patterns. After eight sessions spread out over several days the volunteers reported a greater control over their anxiety and scans of their brain showed a corresponding decrease in connectivity in the regions associated with emotions.

[ read more ]

Brain scans may help personalize treatments

A new study indicates that brain scans of patients with social anxiety disorder can help predict whether they will benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy.

Social anxiety is usually treated with either cognitive behavioral therapy or medications. However, it is currently impossible to predict which treatment will work best for a particular patient. The team of researchers from MIT, Boston University (BU) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) found that the effectiveness of therapy could be predicted by measuring patients’ brain activity as they looked at photos of faces, before the therapy sessions began.

[ more ]

MRI scanners affect concentration and visuospatial awareness

Standard head movements made while exposed to one of the three electromagnetic fields produced by a heavy duty MRI scanner seem to temporarily lower concentration and visuospatial awareness, shows an experimental study published online in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

The effects were particularly noticeable in tasks requiring high levels of working memory, which may have implications for surgeons and other healthcare staff working within the vicinity of an MRI scanner, the research indicates.

[ more ]

Brain computer interface for vegetative-state patients

The first real-time brain-scanning speller will allow people in an apparent vegetative state (unable to speak or move) to communicate, according to Maastricht University scientists.

The new technology builds on earlier uses of fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans by Adrian Owen and colleagues to assess consciousness by enabling patients to answer yes and no questions. fMRI tracks brain activity by measuring blood flow.

“The work led me to wonder whether it might even become possible to use fMRI, mental tasks, and appropriate experimental designs to freely encode thoughts, letter-by-letter, and therewith enable back-and-forth communication in the absence of motor behavior,” said Bettina Sorger of Maastricht University in The Netherlands.

[ more ]

Getting the measure of MRI

Oxford University scientists have come up with a new approach for measuring neurophysiology with quantitative images of cerebrovascular parameters are created from a single scan. This new approac improves  functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that produces pictures of changes in brain activity into a full numerical measure of how the brain is working. Doctors may be able to use this new MRI approach to provide a lot more clinically useful information about patients coming in with strokes, brain injuries or a variety of other conditions.

 [ more ] [ paper ]

Reconstructing Visual Experiences from Brain Activity Evoked by Natural Movies

Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, UC Berkeley researchers have succeeded in decoding and reconstructing people’s dynamic visual experiences – in this case, watching Hollywood movie trailers.

[ more ] [ publication ]

An Objective Way to Measure Pain

Researchers found that by pairing functional MRI (fMRI) with a machine-learning algorithm, they could detect specific patterns of brain activity that predicted whether someone was experiencing pain or not.

[ more ] [ publication ]

Word association with brain scans

In an effort to understand what happens in the brain when a person reads or considers such abstract ideas as love or justice, Princeton researchers have for the first time matched images of brain activity with categories of words related to the concepts a person is thinking about. The results could lead to a better understanding of how people consider meaning and context when reading or thinking.

[ more ] [ also ]

Identifying brain networks for specific mental states

Researchers at Stanford University have determined from brain-imaging data whether experimental subjects are recalling events of the day, singing silently to themselves, performing mental arithmetic, or merely relaxing.

In the study, subjects engaged in these mental activities at their own natural pace, rather than in a controlled, precisely timed fashion as is typically required in experiments involving fMRI. The team used uninterrupted scan periods ranging from 30 seconds to 10 minutes in length.

The team assembled images from each separate scan. Instead of comparing “on-task” images with “off-task” images to see which regions were active during a distinct brain state compared with when the brain wasn’t in that state, the researchers focused on which collections, or networks, of brain regions were active in concert with one another throughout a given state

The researchers found that distinct mental states can be distinguished based on unique patterns of activity in coordinated networks — brain regions that are synchronously communicating with one another.

[ more ]

Neurological Basis for Embarrassment

Recording people belting out an old Motown tune and then asking them to listen to their own singing without the accompanying music seems like an unusually cruel form of punishment. But for a team of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco and University of California, Berkeley, this exact Karaoke experiment has revealed what part of the brain is essential for embarrassment.

The twist to the experiment was that most of the subjects had neurodegenerative diseases, which helped scientists identify a thumb-sized bit of tissue in the right hemisphere of the front part of the brain called the “pregenual anterior cingulate cortex” as integral to embarrassment.

Knowing that people lose their ability to be embarrassed and which part of the brain governs that ability may suggest ways to help diagnose people with certain neurodegenerative diseases earlier.


[ more ]

Tracking the Brain's Ability to Bluff

Brain-imaging experiments show how bargaining games could provide insights into psychiatric disorders. The ability to infer another person's state of mind—including his or her perception of you—is an integral component of human interaction. To make business deals, maintain good relationships, and to play a winning hand of poker, we must be able to surmise to some extent what a client, spouse, or friend is thinking. But that skill can go awry in a number of psychiatric disorders, including autism and borderline personality disorder.

[ more ]

Autism diagnosis by brain scan

Scientists from the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) at King’s College London have developed a 15-minute MRI brain scan that can identify adults with autism with over 90 per cent accuracy. The method could lead to the screening for autism spectrum disorders in children in the future.

MRI scans were used to reconstruct 3D image of the brain that could be assessed for structure, shape and thickness – all intricate measurements that reveal Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) at its root. By studying the complex and subtle make-up of grey matter in the brain, the scientists can use biological markers, rather than personality traits, to assess whether or not a person has ASD.

[ more ]

fMRI research on brain activity validated

In a study published in Nature, a Stanford University-led team has shown that fMRI signals based on elevated levels of oxygenated blood in specific parts of the brain can be caused by activation of local excitatory neurons.

The key experiment involved turning on genetically engineered excitatory neurons in an experimental group of rats in the presence of blue light delivered via a fiber optic cable. The researchers then anesthetized the rats and looked at their brains with fMRI. They found that exciting these defined neurons with the optogenetic light produced the same kind of signals that researchers see in traditional fMRI BOLD experiments — with the same complex patterns and timing. In the control group of rats, which were not genetically altered, no such signals occurred. This showed that true neural excitation indeed produces positive fMRI BOLD signals.

The findings suggest that fMRI can now be used to study the brain-wide impact of changes in neural circuitry, such as ones that may underlie many neurological and psychiatric diseases.

[ more ]

Memories Exist Even When Forgotten

New research by UC Irvine neuroscientists suggests the memory exists – you simply can't retrieve it. scientists discovered that a person's brain activity while remembering an event is very similar to when it was first experienced, even if specifics can't be recalled.

"If the details are still there, hopefully we can find a way to access them," said Jeff Johnson, postdoctoral researcher at UCI's Center for the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory and lead author of the study, appearing Sept. 10 in the journal Neuron.

[ more ]

Emotional speech leaves 'signature' on the brain

If I was reading this sentence aloud, your brain would be able to interpret whether I was speaking in anger, joy, relief, or sadness. That's because emotions in speech leave distinct "signatures" in the brain of the listener.

Now, for the first time, brain scans have now characterised those patterns. The finding could help determine where in the brain deficits in emotion processing occur in people with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia.

[ more ]