Advance in MRI allows faster brain scans

Jan 5, 2011

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Researchers from several institutions believe they have achieved a breakthrough in MRI that would enable brain scans to be performed more than seven times faster than currently possible.

Colored tracks show the direction of nerve fiber bundles, providing a 3D image of the axonal pathways in the white matter (cortex) of a resting human brain. The entire 3D image was scanned in 8.5 minutes instead of 30 minutes. Image courtesy of David Feinberg.

In a study in the December 20 issue of the journal PLoS ONE, a physicist from the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) and colleagues from the University of Minnesota and Oxford University in the U.K. detail two improvements that allow full 3D brain scans in less than half a second, instead of the typical two to three seconds.

The lead author of the study is David Feinberg, a physicist and adjunct professor in UCB's Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and president of the company Advanced MRI Technologies in Sebastopol, CA.

Feinberg noted that because the technique works on all modern MRI scanners, the impact of the ultrafast imaging technique will be immediate and widespread at research institutions worldwide.

In addition to broadly advancing the field of neuroimaging, the discovery will have immediate effects on the Human Connectome Project, funded last year by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to map the connections of the human brain through functional MRI (fMRI) and structural MRI scans of 1,200 healthy adults.

The faster scans are made possible by combining two technical improvements invented in the past decade that separately boosted scanning speeds two to four times more than what was already the fastest MRI technique, echo planar imaging.

Physical limitations of each method prevented further speed improvements, but together their image accelerations are multiplied, Feinberg said.

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