Major Advance in MRI Allows Much Faster Brain Scans

The new technique accelerates diffusion MRI as well as functional MRI. The colored tracks show the direction of nerve fiber bundles, providing a 3-D image of the axonal pathways in the white matter (cortex) of a resting human brain. A normal structural cross sectional image of the brain (fMRI) bisects the diffusion 3-D fibertrack image. The entire 3-D image was scanned in 8.5 minutes instead of 30 minutes. (Credit: David Feinberg)

An international team of physicists and neuroscientists has reported a breakthrough in magnetic resonance imaging that allows brain scans more than seven times faster than currently possible.

In a paper that appeared Dec. 20 in the journalĀ PLoS ONE, a University of California, Berkeley, physicist and colleagues from the University of Minnesota and Oxford University in the United Kingdom describe two improvements that allow full three-dimensional brain scans in less than half a second, instead of the typical 2 to 3 seconds.

“When we made the first images, it was unbelievable how fast we were going,” said first author David Feinberg, a physicist and adjunct professor in UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and president of the company Advanced MRI Technologies in Sebastopol, Calif. “It was like stepping out of a prop plane into a jet plane. It was that magnitude of difference.”

For neuroscience, in particular, fast scans are critical for capturing the dynamic activity in the brain.

“When a functional MRI study of the brain is performed, about 30 to 60 images covering the entire 3-D brain are repeated hundreds of times like the frames of a movie but, with fMRI, a 3-D movie,” Feinberg said. “By multiplexing the image acquisition for higher speed, a higher frame rate is achieved for more information in a shorter period of time.”

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