Oxford’s FMRIB Centre needs to replace its decade-old brain scanner with an ultra high-field model that will capture far more detailed images of the brain at work. The current scanner cannot keep up with the questions researchers now want to ask—how the brain processes pain, makes decisions, learns new skills, or combines signals from both eyes to guide vision. Without better resolution, scientists cannot track what happens inside an individual patient’s brain after a stroke or during recovery, which limits their ability to explain why some patients improve and others do not. The new scanner will let a team of nearly 100 physicists, engineers, neuroscientists, and doctors share a single instrument to study both healthy brain function and disease. The immediate challenge is technical: ultra high-field imaging is difficult to run, so the grant also funds physics and computing experts to solve those problems. If successful, the work will give clinicians clearer, patient-specific knowledge about brain injury and recovery, helping them tailor treatments to individuals rather than relying on averages.
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The FMRIB Centre at the University of Oxford is one of the leading UK centres for imaging the human brain. We use many different types of technology to find out how the healthy brain works, and to help understand brain diseases (e.g. stroke). This work requires a large team of researchers with varied skills, including physicists, engineers, neuroscientists and medical doctors. The FMRIB Centre has been running for 10 years and our original brain scanner is now out of date. We need to buy a new scanner and we propose to buy one that will give us much more detailed pictures of the brain. A modern, ultra high-field scanner will provide a huge leap forward. We will be able to visualise what is going on inside the head when people are thinking, seeing, feeling and learning new skills. Importantly, we will also learn how peoples brains react after they have been injured by strokes or other diseases. The long-term aim is to give doctors the best advice and knowledge about how to treat their patients. Getting the most out of an ultra high-field scanner is technically challenging so we are also asking for money to pay experts in physics and computing to help solve these challenges. Nearly 100 scientists and doctors at the FMRIB Centre will share the new equipment to ask questions about many different aspects of brain function. For example, how the brain deals with pain, what goes on in the brain when we make a decision, what brain changes occur when we learn a new skill, and how information from our two eyes is combined to help guide our vision. In all cases, we will be interested not only to find out what goes on in the healthy brain, but also how things go wrong when the brain is affected by diseases. In particular, the new scanner will follow changes in the brain of an individual patient. This would allow us to work out why some patients do better than others, and to learn how best to treat an individual patient. The mix of experts available at the FMRIB Centre is unique and international, and we also benefit greatly from working with other scientists and doctors in Oxford. We feel that we are extremely well placed to make good use of this exciting new opportunity.
Andrew John Parker (Co-Investigator)Heidi Johansen-Berg (Co-Investigator)Irene Tracey (Principal Investigator)Matthew Rushworth (Co-Investigator)Peter Jezzard (Co-Investigator)Stephen Smith (Co-Investigator)
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