MRI technology from Duke-led effort reveals the entire mouse brain in the highest resolution
DURHAM, N.C. – Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is how we visualize soft, watery tissue that is hard to image with X-rays. But while an MRI provides good enough resolution to spot a brain tumor, it needs to be a lot sharper to visualize microscopic details within the brain that reveal its organization.
In a decades-long technical tour de force led by Duke’s Center for In Vivo Microscopy with colleagues at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, University of Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh and Indiana University, researchers took up the gauntlet and improved the resolution of MRI leading to the sharpest images ever captured of a mouse brain.
Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the first MRI, the researchers generated scans of a mouse brain that are dramatically crisper than a typical clinical MRI for humans, the scientific equivalent of going from a pixelated 8-bit graphic to the hyper-realistic detail of a Chuck Close painting.
A single voxel of the new images – think of it as a cubic pixel – measures just 5 microns. That’s 64 million times smaller than a clinical MRI voxel.
Although the researchers focused their magnets on mice instead of humans, the refined MRI provides an important new way to visualize the connectivity of the entire brain at record-breaking resolution. The researchers say new insights from mouse imaging will in turn lead to a better understanding of conditions in humans, su
