EAGER: Numerical Simulation of Neural Current MR Imaging Experiments

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This EAGER award funds a theoretical study of a proposed new technology for measuring neural currents within brain tissue. This research project is headed by Professors Lawrence Frank and Terrence Sejnowski at UC San Diego. The research program funded by this grant concerns new methods of understanding and measuring the electrical processes that occur within the human brain and which signal brain activity. Current techniques involve functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI), but these methods only operate indirectly by triggering on the electrical changes that occur in the blood surrounding the brain or within the brain. Such techniques are therefore limited by the fact that blood flow induces a certain fundamental inaccuracy having to do with spatial separation (the distance of blood flowing prior to FMRI detection) as well as a time lag which separates the time of the original electrical activity in the brain and its subsequent impact on the surrounding blood. In this study, by contrast, the PI's will analyze a new technology which might be able to completely overcome these limitations by focusing directly on the neural currents within the brain tissue itself. This new technology is referred to as "neural current MRI", and the PI's will model the effects of these neural currents and the possibilities for their detection by conducting a detailed numerical simulation of such brain activity. The implications and broader impacts of such a project are significant. The results of such a study might help to pave the way for a whole new technology by which we might be able to image the brain with a precision never previously achieved. Moreover, because the research in this proposal crosses many traditional boundaries (including biology, physics, and computational mathematics), it is highly interdisciplinary. The results of this study therefore have the potential to benefit research in a variety of related disciplines.