Posts tagged Human Connectome Project
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Study reveals new clues to help understand brain stimulation
Findings could help guide clinicians in selecting stimulation sites and improve treatment for neurological and psychiatric disorders
Over the past several decades, brain stimulation has become an increasingly important treatment option for a number of psychiatric and neurological conditions.
Divided into two broad approaches, invasive and noninvasive, brain stimulation works by targeting specific sites to adjust brain activity. The most widely known invasive technique, deep brain stimulation (DBS), requires brain surgery to insert an electrode and is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor. Noninvasive techniques, including transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), can be administered from outside the head and are currently approved for the treatment of depression. Brain stimulation can result in dramatic benefit to patients with these disorders, motivating researchers to test whether it can also help patients with other diseases.
But, in many cases, the ideal sites to administer stimulation have remained ambiguous. Exactly where in the brain is the best spot to stimulate to treat a given patient or a given disease?
Now a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) helps answer this question. Led by investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), the findings suggest that brain networks – the interconnected pathways that link brain circuits to one another— can help guide site selection for brain stimulation therapies.
"Although different types of brain stimulation are currently applied in different locations, we found that the targets used to treat the same disease are nodes in the same connected brain network," says first author Michael D. Fox, MD, PhD, an investigator in the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation and in the Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders Center at BIDMC.
"This may have implications for how we administer brain stimulation to treat disease. If you want to treat Parkinson’s disease or tremor with brain stimulation, you can insert an electrode deep in the brain and get a great effect. However, getting this same benefit with noninvasive stimulation is difficult, as you can’t directly stimulate the same site deep in the brain from outside the head," explains Fox, an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School (HMS). "But, by looking at the brain’s own network connectivity, we can identify sites on the surface of the brain that connect with this deep site, and stimulate those sites noninvasively."
Brain networks consist of interconnected pathways linking brain circuits or loops, similar to a college campus in which paved sidewalks connect a wide variety of buildings.
In this paper, Fox led a team that first conducted a large-scale literature search to identify all neurological and psychiatric diseases where improvement had been seen with both invasive and noninvasive brain stimulation. Their analysis revealed 14 conditions: addiction, Alzheimer’s disease, anorexia, depression, dystonia, epilepsy, essential tremor, gait dysfunction, Huntington’s disease, minimally conscious state, obsessive compulsive disorder, pain, Parkinson disease and Tourette syndrome. They next listed the stimulation sites, either deep in the brain or on the surface of the brain, thought to be effective for the treatment of each of the 14 diseases.
"We wanted to test the hypothesis that these various stimulation sites are actually different spots within the same brain network," explains Fox. "To examine the connectivity from any one site to other brain regions, we used a data base of functional MRI images and a technique that enables you to see correlations in spontaneous brain activity." From these correlations, the investigators were able to create a map of connections from deep brain stimulation sites to the surface of the brain. When they compared this map to sites on the brain surface that work for noninvasive brain stimulation, the two matched.
"These results suggest that brain networks might be used to help us better understand why brain stimulation works and to improve therapy by identifying the best place to stimulate the brain for each individual patient and given disease," says senior author Alvaro Pascual-Leone, MD, PhD, the Director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at BIDMC and Professor of Neurology at HMS. "This study illustrates the potential of gaining fundamental insights into brain function while helping patients with debilitating diseases, and provides us with a powerful way of selecting targets based on their connectivity to other regions that can be widely applied to help guide brain stimulation therapy across multiple neurological and psychiatric disorders."
"As we’re trying different types of brain stimulation for different diseases, the question comes up, ‘How does one relate to the other?’" notes Fox. "In other words, can we use the success in one to help design a trial or inform how we apply a new type of brain stimulation? Our new findings suggest that resting-state functional connectivity may be useful for translating therapy between treatment modalities, optimizing treatment and identifying new stimulation targets."
(Source: eurekalert.org)
Human Connectome Project releases major data set on brain connectivity
The Human Connectome Project, a five-year endeavor to link brain connectivity to human behavior, has released a set of high-quality imaging and behavioral data to the scientific community. The project has two major goals: to collect vast amounts of data using advanced brain imaging methods on a large population of healthy adults, and to make the data freely available so that scientists worldwide can make further discoveries about brain circuitry.
The initial data release includes brain imaging scans plus behavioral information — individual differences in personality, cognitive capabilities, emotional characteristics and perceptual function — obtained from 68 healthy adult volunteers. Over the next several years, the number of subjects studied will increase steadily to a final target of 1,200. The initial release is an important milestone because the new data have much higher resolution in space and time than data obtained by conventional brain scans.
The Human Connectome Project (HCP) consortium is led by David C. Van Essen, PhD, Alumni Endowed Professor at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and Kamil Ugurbil, PhD, Director of the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research and the McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair Professor at the University of Minnesota.
“By making this unique data set available now, and continuing with regular data releases every quarter, the Human Connectome Project is enabling the scientific community to immediately begin exploring relationships between brain circuits and individual behavior,” says Van Essen. “The HCP will have a major impact on our understanding of the healthy adult human brain, and it will set the stage for future projects that examine changes in brain circuits underlying the wide variety of brain disorders afflicting humankind.”
The consortium includes more than 100 investigators and technical staff at 10 institutions in the United States and Europe (www.humanconnectome.org). It is funded by 16 components of the National Institutes of Health via the Blueprint for Neuroscience Research (www.neuroscienceblueprint.nih.gov).
“The high quality of the data being made available in this release reflects an intensive, multiyear effort to improve the data acquisition and analysis methods by this dedicated international team of investigators,” says Ugurbil.
The data set includes information about brain connectivity in each individual, using two distinct magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) approaches. One, called resting-state functional connectivity, is based on spontaneous fluctuations in functional MRI signals that occur in a complex pattern in space and time throughout the gray matter of the brain. Another, called diffusion imaging, provides information about the long-distance “wiring” – the anatomical pathways traversing the brain’s white matter. Each method has its own limitations, and analyses of both functional connectivity and structural connectivity in each subject should allow deeper insight than by either method alone.
Each subject is also scanned while performing a variety of tasks within the scanner, thereby providing extensive information about “Task-fMRI” brain activation patterns. Behavioral data using a variety of tests performed outside the scanner are being released along with the scan data for each subject. The subjects are drawn from families that include siblings, some of whom are twins. This will enable studies of the heritability of brain circuits.
The imaging data set released by the HCP takes up about two terabytes (2 trillion bytes) of computer memory — the equivalent of more than 400 DVDs — and is stored in a customized database called “ConnectomeDB.”
“ConnectomeDB is the next-generation neuroinformatics software for data sharing and data mining. It’s a convenient and user-friendly way for scientists to explore the available HCP data and to download data of interest for their research,” says Daniel S. Marcus, PhD, assistant professor of radiology and director of the Neuroinformatics Research Group at Washington University School of Medicine. “The Human Connectome Project represents a major advance in sharing brain imaging data in ways that will accelerate the pace of discovery about the human brain in health and disease.”
Scans reveal intricate brain wiring
Scientists are set to release the first batch of data from a project designed to create the first map of the human brain.
The project could help shed light on why some people are naturally scientific, musical or artistic.
Some of the first images were shown at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston.
I found out how researchers are developing new brain imaging techniques for the project by having my own brain scanned.
Scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital are pushing brain imaging to its limit using a purpose built scanner. It is one of the most powerful scanners in the world.
The scanner’s magnets need 22MW of electricity - enough to power a nuclear submarine.
The researchers invited me to have my brain scanned. I was asked if I wanted “the 10-minute job or the 45-minute ‘full monty’” which would give one of the most detailed scans of the brain ever carried out. Only 50 such scans have ever been done.
I went for the full monty.
It was a pleasant experience enclosed in the scanner’s vast twin magnets. Powerful and rapidly changing magnetic fields were looking to see tiny particles of water travelling along the larger nerve fibres.
By following the droplets, the scientists in the adjoining cubicle are able to trace the major connections within my brain.
3D reconstruction of Phineas Gage’s skull, showing the passage of the tamping iron. Read about Gage’s connectome here