A new collaborative ultra-high field MRI facility for dementia and neuroscience research

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Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has revolutionised the study of the brain and brain diseases like dementia over the last 20 years. Conventional MRI scanners have their limitations however. We will therefore build an "ultrahigh-field" MRI, which offers a major step forward in how clearly one can study the brain's structure, function and chemistry. This new scanner will be dedicated to the challenge of dementia, supported by scientific work to understand the normal brain and advanced analysis. It will be a major contributor to the UK Dementia Platform, a unique and radical approach to join up medical research across the country's specialist centres and drug company partners in the fight against dementia. The new "7T" scanner will be built on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, next to Addenbrookes Hospital. It is a collaboration between Cambridge University and the Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (CBSU), working closely with the NHS. We will use the new scanner to detect and characterise over time the major brain diseases like Alzheimer's, Stroke and Parkinson's Disease. With our ageing population, the number of people suffering from dementia is likely to increase from the current level of 800,000. The need is urgent to identify people in the earliest stages of such diseases, or even before symptoms, in order to test treatments that combat dementia. Cambridge is ideally suited for this research, because of i) its existing expertise in dementia and MRI brain scanning, ii) its key role in national initiatives to understand dementia and the healthy ageing process, iii) its collaborations with major pharmaceutical companies to develop new treatments, and iv) the existence of large cohort studies that track normal ageing over decades, and groups of research volunteers who, because of genetics or lifestyle, are at-risk of dementia. MRI is a very versatile technology. MRI scanners can be "tuned" to measure the grey matter (home to most of the brain cells), white matter (the wiring of the brain), the major chemicals in the brain and microscopic effects of dementia. MRI can also measure brain function, allowing researchers to map the brain areas needed for attention, memory or language. The new scanner gives much greater detail across the entire brain, allowing researchers to understand how the brain works as a whole while still seeing detail at a sub-millimetre scale. This detail is important for diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, for which small and deep parts of the brainstem are critical but difficult to see with conventional MRI. Moreover, the increased detail offered by ultrahigh field MRI opens the window on an important level of organisation in the brain: the thin layers of the surface of the brain, which have until recently only been studied with invasive recordings. With the new scanner, we can safely study this fundamental level of brain organisation in humans. This will accelerate our scientific understanding of the basic workings of the brain. This draws on the very large community of brain researchers in Cambridge, to investigate, for example, the i) brain changes that put some people at risk of addiction, ii) brain networks linked to obesity, iii) how the brain normally ages, and why some people are resilient as they get older, and iv) how the brain matures through teenage years, when major mental illness like schizophrenia normally begin. Other medical researchers will use the scanner to understand i) recovery of the brain after head injury, ii) the brain systems implicated in pain, and iii) stroke and other disorders associated with impairments in the brain's blood supply. The depth and breadth of brain research is why the University of Cambridge and partners are planning to join together with the Medical Research Council to invest in this breakthrough technology. The ultrahigh-field MRI will advance both basic and medical research, to improve the health of the nation.