MRI helps X-rays see soft, fluid tissue. MRI can detect brain tumors, but it cannot see minuscule brain characteristics that indicate its organization.
Duke’s Centre for In Vivo Microscopy led a decades-long effort to improve MRI resolution, resulting in the sharpest mouse brain images ever taken.
For the 50th anniversary of the first MRI, scientists developed mouse brain pictures that are sharper than human clinical MRIs. This is like moving from an 8-bit graphic to a Chuck Close painting.
Voxels (cubic pixels) in the new photos are 5 microns. 64 million times smaller than a clinical MRI voxel.
Magnets targeted mice. The improved MRI shows brain connections at unprecedented detail. Mouse imaging may help us understand how the brain changes with age, food, and neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s.
The new paper’s principal author, Duke’s Charles E. Putman University Distinguished professor of radiology, physics, and biomedical engineering G. Allan Johnson, Ph.D., stated, “It is truly enabling.” We can rethink neurodegenerative diseases.”
Researchers use a 9.4 Tesla magnet, a set of gradient coils 100 times more powerful than those in clinical MRIs, and a high-performance computer that is equivalent to nearly 800 laptops working together to image one brain.
After “scanning the daylights out of it,” Johnson and his team submit the tissue to light sheet microscopy. This additional technology labels dopamine-producing brain cells to follow Parkinson’s illness.
The team then overlays the light sheet pictures with the original MRI scan, which is more anatomically exact and shows cells and circuits throughout the brain.
This unified whole-brain data imaging allows researchers to investigate the brain’s smallest secrets in ways never previously possible.
This entire brain data picture lets researchers see the brain’s smallest secrets for the first time.
One set of MRI pictures reveals how brain-wide connectivity changes as mice mature and how certain areas, like the memory-involved subiculum, change more than others.
A rainbow-colored brain spool shows the astonishing neural network degeneration in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease.
Johnson and others seek to better comprehend mice models of human illnesses like Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s by making the MRI a more powerful microscope. That should help you understand how comparable things work or fail in individuals.
Johnson added, “National Institute of Aging-supported research found that modest dietary and drug interventions could lead to animals living 25% longer. Does their brain survive this longer lifespan? Crossword puzzles? Despite living 25% longer, can they do Sudoku? We can look now. We may apply that directly to human condition.”