Wearable brain and spinal cord imaging for real-world neuroscience

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The brain and spinal cord rely heavily on each other, meaning that damage to one affects the other, but it has been very difficult to study these effects in humans. Until now these two systems have been studied largely in isolation, or have required people to lie perfectly still in a scanning tunnel. We recently developed a wearable scanner, consisting of a helmet and backpack that can be worn with some degree of movement possible.While this is much more comfortable for the person being scanned, the main hindrance to movement is the cabling, which is dense and trails behind the person. The purpose of this proposal is to make this wearable system effectively wireless, allowing complete freedom of movement. This new system will be especially important for the many debilitating conditions (such as spinal cord injury, stroke, dementia) that could be better diagnosed and treated if we could directly image how the brain and spinal cord interact.