First micro-structure atlas of the human brain completed

A European team of scientists have built the first atlas of white-matter microstructure in the human brain. The project’s final results have the potential to change the face of neuroscience and medicine over the coming decade.

The work relied on groundbreaking MRI technology and was funded by the EU’s future and emerging technologies program with a grant of 2.4 million Euros. The participants of the project, called CONNECT, were drawn from leading research centers in countries across Europe including Israel, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Denmark, Switzerland and Italy.

The new atlas combines three-dimensional images from the MRI scans of 100 brains of volunteers. To achieve this, CONNECT developed advanced MRI methods providing unprecedented detail and accuracy.

Professor Daniel Alexander, a CONNECT steering committee member from the UCL Department of Computer Science said: “The UCL team use the latest computer modelling algorithms and hardware to invent new imaging techniques. The techniques we devised were key to realising the new CONNECT brain atlas.”The imaging techniques reveal new information about brain structure that help us understand how low-level cellular architecture relate to high-level thought processes.”

Will Neuroscience Radically Transform the Legal System?

Although academic fields will often enjoy more than Andy Warhol’s famous 15 minutes of fame, they too are subject to today’s ever-hungry machinery of hype. Like people, bands, diets, and everything else, a field gets discovered, plucked from obscurity, thrown into the spotlight, and quickly replaced as it becomes yesterday’s news.

Neuroscience is now the popular plat de jour, or, perhaps better, the prefixde jour, and neurolaw is one of the main beneficiaries—and victims. Neuroscience will have important and even dramatic effects on our society and, as a result, on our laws. But not yet, and not as dramatically as some envision.

First, consider timing. Many of the most interesting neuroscience results come from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This technique allows us to see what parts of the brain are working and when, and thus to begin to correlate subjective mental states with physical brain states. The use of fMRI on humans goes back about 15 years, and although about 5,000 peer-reviewed scientific articles involving fMRI will be published this year, we are still trying to figure out how it works—or doesn’t. The fMRI results showing apparently purposeful brain activity in dead salmon are a wonderfully funny example of some of the limits of this technology, and fMRI is one of the oldest of the “new” neuroscience technologies. Half of what neuroscience is teaching us about human brain function will be shown, in the next 20 years, to be wrong—and we will need each of those 20 years to figure out which half.

But, second, we need a sense of proportion. Neuroscience will provide tools that will change the law in some important ways, but those tools will be neither perfect nor used in isolation, and those changes are not likely to strike at the law’s roots.

Calcium reveals connections between neurons

A team led by MIT neuroscientists has developed a way to monitor how brain cells coordinate with each other to control specific behaviors, such as initiating movement or detecting an odor.

The researchers’ new imaging technique, based on the detection of calcium ions in neurons, could help them map the brain circuits that perform such functions. It could also provide new insights into the origins of autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder and other psychiatric diseases, says Guoping Feng, senior author of a paper appearing in the Oct. 18 issue of the journal Neuron.

“To understand psychiatric disorders we need to study animal models, and to find out what’s happening in the brain when the animal is behaving abnormally,” says Feng, the James W. and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience and a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. “This is a very powerful tool that will really help us understand animal models of these diseases and study how the brain functions normally and in a diseased state.”

Relapse or recovery? Neuroimaging predicts course of substance addiction treatment

An Indiana University study has provided preliminary evidence that by measuring brain activity through the use of neuroimaging, researchers can predict who is likely to have an easier time getting off drugs and alcohol, and who will need extra help.

"We can also see how brain activity changes as people recover from their addictions," said Joshua Brown, assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, part of the College of Arts and Sciences.

The chronic occurrence of relapse underscores the need for improved methods of treatment and relapse prevention. One potential cause for relapse is deficient self-regulatory control over behavior and decision-making. Specifically this lack of self-regulatory ability in substance dependent individuals has been associated with dysfunction of a mesolimbic-frontal brain network. Reduced activity within this self-regulatory brain network has previously been implicated in relapse, but the specific relationship between this network, self-regulatory ability and recovery is yet to be determined.

Stony Brook Researchers Develop Neuroimaging Technique Capturing Cocaine’s Devastating Effect on Brain Blood Flow

Researchers from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Stony Brook University have developed a high-resolution, 3D optical Doppler imaging tomography technique that captures the effects of cocaine restricting the blood supply in vessels – including small capillaries – of the brain. The study, reported in Molecular Psychiatry, and with images on the journal’s October 2012 cover, illustrates the first use of the novel neuroimaging technique and provides evidence of cocaine-induced cerebral microischemia, which can cause stroke.

In “Cocaine-induced cortical microischemia in the rodent brain: clinical implications,” the researchers discovered that cocaine administered in doses equivalent to those normally taken by abusers caused constriction in blood vessels that inhibited CBF for varying lengths of time. Brain arteries, veins, and even capillaries, the smallest vessels, were affected by the doses. CBF was markedly decreased within just two-to-three minutes after drug administration. In some vessels, a decrease in CBF reached 70 percent. Recovery time for the vessels varied. Cocaine interrupted CBF in some arteriolar branches for more than 45 minutes. This effect became more pronounced after repeated cocaine administration.

“Our study revealed evidence of cocaine-induced cerebral microischemic changes in multiple experimental models, and we were able to clearly image the process and vasoactive effects at a microvascular level,” said study Principal Investigator Yingtian Pan, PhD, Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Stony Brook University. “These clinical changes jeopardize oxygen delivery to cerebral tissue making it vulnerable to ischemia and neuronal death.”

Auto experts recognize cars like most people recognize faces

When people – and monkeys – look at faces, a special part of their brain that is about the size of a blueberry “lights up.” Now, the most detailed brain-mapping study of the area yet conducted has confirmed that it isn’t limited to processing faces, as some experts have maintained, but instead serves as a general center of expertise for visual recognition.

Neuroscientists previously established that this region, which is called the fusiform face area (FFA) and is located in the temporal lobe, is responsible for a particularly effective form of visual recognition. But there has been an ongoing debate about whether this area is hard-wired to recognize faces because of their importance to us or if it is a more general mechanism that allows us to rapidly recognize objects that we work with extensively.

In the new study published this week in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of Vanderbilt researchers report that they have recorded the activity in the FFAs of a group of automobile aficionados at extremely high resolution using one the most powerful MRI scanners available for human use and found no evidence that there is a special area devoted exclusively to facial recognition. Instead, they found that the FFA of the auto experts was filled with small, interspersed patches that respond strongly to photos of faces and autos both.

Study explores how brain disruption may foster schizophrenia

Yale University researchers have discovered an innovative way to study how large brain systems are organized, an advance that has already provided insights into diseases such as schizophrenia.

The Yale team used a combination of neuroimaging, computational neurobiology, and pharmacological techniques to reveal functioning at both the cellular level and across larger brain regions.

In a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Sept. 24, Yale scientists use this approach to show that a disruption of a particular signaling mechanisms within larger neural systems may be contribute to schizophrenia symptoms.

Neuroscientists Investigate Lotteries to Study How the Brain Evaluates Risk

People are faced with thousands of choices every day, some inane and some risky. Scientists know that the areas of the brain that evaluate risk are the same for each person, but what makes the value assigned to risk different for individuals?

To answer this question, a new video article in Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to characterize subjective risk assessment while subjects choose between different lotteries to play.

The article, a joint effort from laboratories at Yale School of Medicine and New York University, is led by Yale’s Dr. Ifat Levy. Dr. Levy explains, “This procedure allows us to examine all kinds of normal and pathological behaviors focusing on risk assessment. It could explain things like substance abuse and over-eating from a different perspective than how it is usually characterized.”

I’ve been up since 6 am. I’ve had a breath test for alcohol, a urine test for drugs and a psychological test for mental health. Then I’m handed a red pill and a glass of water. I swallow it… and I’m told to relax. Which is easier said than done when you don’t know if you’ve just taken vitamin C or 83 milligrams of pure MDMA.

I’m taking part in a groundbreaking study on MDMA, the drug commonly known as ecstasy. The research is run by David Nutt of Imperial College London, a former government adviser and one of the few UK researchers licensed to study class-A drugs.

His main aim is to discover what MDMA does to the human brain, something that, remarkably, has never been done before. A second goal is to study MDMA as a therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. The experiment is also being filmed for a Channel 4 documentary called Drugs Live: The Ecstasy Trial, which will be broadcast in the UK next week.