Advanced MR Imaging of Brain Structure and Function in Health and Disease

The FMRIB Centre at the University of Oxford is one of the leading UK centres for imaging the human brain. We use many different types of technology to find out how the healthy brain works, and to help understand brain diseases (e.g. stroke). This work requires a large team of researchers with varied skills, including physicists, engineers, neuroscientists and medical doctors.
The FMRIB Centre has been running for 10 years and our original brain scanner is now out of date. We need to buy a new scanner and we propose to buy one that will give us much more detailed pictures of the brain. A modern, ultra high-field scanner will provide a huge leap forward. We will be able to visualise what is going on inside the head when people are thinking, seeing, feeling and learning new skills. Importantly, we will also learn how peoples brains react after they have been injured by strokes or other diseases. The long-term aim is to give doctors the best advice and knowledge about how to treat their patients. Getting the most out of an ultra high-field scanner is technically challenging so we are also asking for money to pay experts in physics and computing to help solve these challenges.
Nearly 100 scientists and doctors at the FMRIB Centre will share the new equipment to ask questions about many different aspects of brain function. For example, how the brain deals with pain, what goes on in the brain when we make a decision, what brain changes occur when we learn a new skill, and how information from our two eyes is combined to help guide our vision. In all cases, we will be interested not only to find out what goes on in the healthy brain, but also how things go wrong when the brain is affected by diseases. In particular, the new scanner will follow changes in the brain of an individual patient. This would allow us to work out why some patients do better than others, and to learn how best to treat an individual patient.
The mix of experts available at the FMRIB Centre is unique and international, and we also benefit greatly from working with other scientists and doctors in Oxford. We feel that we are extremely well placed to make good use of this exciting new opportunity.

The Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain (FMRIB) is a world-class, multidisciplinary, integrative MR imaging laboratory. Our translational neuroscience research in pain, plasticity in disease, cognition and in vivo neuroanatomy, combined with excellence in MR physics and image analysis, creates a unique environment for scientists and clinicians from Oxford, the UK and overseas. Advances in ultra-high-field imaging provide a timely and hitherto unrealised opportunity to move neuroimaging away from the primary domain of the research environment towards genuine translational approaches that can be applied to the individual subject or patient. We aim to place FMRIB at the leading edge of this next wave of development by providing an advanced high field 7 Tesla imaging system and the necessary infrastructure as a platform from which we gain the benefits of improved signal-to-noise, contrast and resolution, thereby making this opportunity a reality. Our programme for 7T includes novel MR physics developments in radiofrequency coil designs, B0-inhomogeneity and physiological noise correction methods, magnetic resonance spectroscopy, quantitative FMRI and high resolution structural imaging. All these MR physics developments require simultaneous advances in our image analysis techniques, a synergy that will continue and strengthen with this initiative. This two-pronged approach will deliver statistically meaningful readouts of both structure and function on an individual subject basis. In the pain programme, the increased spatial resolution and contrast at 7T will directly benefit our human brainstem pain research, providing valuable new information to guide surgical procedures for the treatment of chronic pain. Harnessing image analysis tools to study single event, single subject and single session imaging data, obtainable due to the increased SNR at 7T, will substantially advance the development of the pain centre at Oxford and our drug development research. The plasticity-in-disease, cognition and vision programmes of research all gain equally strong benefits from working at 7T, most notably from examining the individual brain from a structural and functional perspective. Securing key infrastructure posts as part of this bid is critical for the operational running of the entire FMRIB Centre. These people will have a critical role in exploiting the proposed 7T scanner and training the next generation of neuroimagers and systems neuroscientists in these advanced technologies. A focussed and timely capital investment in this high impact programme not only provides excellent value for money but potential benefits for human health as well as securing FMRIB?s world-class capabilities for the next 10-15 years.