Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
A neurological “functional fingerprint” allows scientists to explore the influence of genetics, environment and aging on brain connectivity, as WIRED reports.
Michaela Cordova,
a research associate and lab manager at Oregon Health and Science
University, begins by “de-metaling”: removing rings, watches, gadgets
and other sources of metal, double-checking her pockets for overlooked
objects that could, in her words, “fly in.” Then she enters the scanning
room, raises and lowers the bed, and waves a head coil in the general
direction of the viewing window and the iPad camera that’s enabling this
virtual lab tour (I’m watching from thousands of miles away in
Massachusetts). Her voice is mildly distorted by the microphone embedded
in the MRI scanner, which from my slightly blurry vantage point looks
less like an industrial cannoli than a beast with a glowing blue mouth. I
can’t help but think that eerie description might resonate with her
usual clientele.
Cordova works with children, assuaging their fears, easing them in
and out of the scanner while coaxing them with soft words, Pixar movies
and promises of snacks to minimize wiggling. These kids are enrolled in
research aimed at mapping the brain’s neural connections.
The
physical links between brain regions, collectively known as the
“connectome,” are part of what distinguish humans cognitively from other
species. But they also differentiate us from one another. Scientists
are now combining neuroimaging approaches with machine learning to
understand the commonalities and differences in brain structure and
function across individuals, with the goal of predicting how a given
brain will change over time because of genetic and environmental
influences.
The lab where Cordova works, headed by associate professor Damien Fair,
is concerned with the functional connectome, the map of brain regions
that coordinate to carry out specific tasks and to influence behavior...
Characterizing the Connectome
Traditional techniques for
mapping the functional connectome focus on just two brain regions at a
time, using MRI data to correlate how the activity of each changes in
relation to the other. Brain regions with signals that vary in unison
are assigned a score of 1. If one increases while the other decreases,
that merits a –1. If there is no observable relationship between the
two, that’s a 0.
This approach, however, has limitations. For instance, it considers
these pairs of regions independently of the rest of the brain, even
though each is likely to also be influenced by inputs from neighboring
areas, and those extra inputs might mask the true functional connection
of any pair.
Read more...
Source: WIRED