Martinos Center researchers among the first awardees of BRAIN Initiative grants

The National Institutes of Health announced today its first wave of investments, totaling $46 million in FY2014, to support the goals of the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative.  Martinos Center investigators are among the recipients.

Larry Wald will head up the project "Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI) for Functional Brain Imaging in Humans," in which he and colleagues plan to use an iron-oxide contrast agent to track blood volume, permitting dramatically more sensitive imaging of human brain activity than existing methods. Read about the project here.

Also, Kawin Setsompop is among a team of investigators led by David Feinberg at the University of California, Berkeley, developing a new technique—MRI Corticography (MRCoG)—for micro-scale human cortical imaging. The researchers will employ high-sensitivity MRI coils that focus exclusively on the brain's surface to image the activity and connections of the brain's cortex with significantly higher resolution than is available with existing scanners. More about this project here.