MRI-R2: Acquisition for High-Performance Imaging of the Human Brain

该奖项是根据2009年《美国复苏与再投资法案》(Public Law 111-5)资助的。这项NSF重大研究仪器(MRI-R2)奖将提供为期三年的拨款，用于购买加州理工学院的单个人脑成像设备的升级。此次升级是对西门子3.0特斯拉核磁共振扫描仪的32通道全成像矩阵升级，将显著提高分辨率、进行实验的速度以及可编程的成像序列的种类。总而言之，这些重大改进将使人们能够对人脑的结构、连通性和功能提出一系列问题。加州理工学院的研究人员将与一个国内和国际科学家财团合作，使用这些设备来研究大脑如何做出财务决策，如何处理人脸等社交信息，以及如何构建脑机接口来破译大脑中的信息，以指导机器人假肢。这些都是神经科学中重要的、重大的悬而未决的问题，新设备将极大地提高加州理工大学脑成像中心的科学水平。拨款还将为学生和博士后提供关于新设备的培训机会。这将包括在加州理工学院教授的课程以及参与个人研究项目。这些新科学工具的发展将使人们更好地了解大脑是如何工作的，它是如何连接起来的，以及它是如何在疾病中功能障碍的。这些知识反过来将有助于建立人工智能系统的努力。总而言之，新设备带来的尖端科学，以及对下一代年轻科学家的培训，将对美国和世界各地的认知神经科学做出重大贡献。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).This NSF Major Research Instrumentation (MRI-R2) Award will enable a three-year grant to purchase an upgrade for a single piece of equipment for imaging the human brain at the California Institute of Technology. The upgrade, a 32-channel Total Imaging Matrix upgrade of a Siemens 3.0 Tesla MRI scanner, will substantially improve the resolution, the speed with which experiments can be done, and the kinds of imaging sequences that can be programmed. Taken together, these major enhancements will enable a range of questions about the structure, connectivity, and functioning of the human brain. Researchers at Caltech, in collaboration with a national and international consortium of scientists, will use the equipment to investigate how the brain makes financial decisions, how social information such as faces are processed, and how brain-machine interfaces can be built to decipher information from the brain to guide robotic prostheses. These are important, big open questions in neuroscience, and the new equipment will greatly enhance science at the Caltech Brain Imaging Center.The grant will also provide opportunities for training of students and post-docs on the new equipment. This will include classes taught at Caltech as well as participation in individual research projects. The development of these new scientific tools will lead to a better understanding of how the brain works, how it is wired up, and how it may dysfunction in disease. That knowledge, in turn, will contribute to efforts to build artificially intelligent systems. Taken together, the cutting-edge science enabled by the new equipment, and the training of the next generation of young scientists on it, will contribute substantially to cognitive neuroscience in America and worldwide.