Neurological and psychiatric disorders may be diagnosed through functional connectivity MRI (fcMRI) by detecting differences in neural networks, according to an April 18 release from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Senior author of the study, Steven Petersen, PhD, a professor of neurosurgery, biomedical engineering, brain sciences, and radiology at the university expressed in a prepared statement that the findings move towards fully realizing the potential of fcMRI.
“Before we can develop diagnostic tests based on fcMRI, we need to know what it is actually measuring," Petersen said in a prepared statement. "We show here that it’s not measuring what you’re thinking, but how your brain is organized. That opens the door to an entire new field of clinical testing.”
According to the press release, Petersen and colleagues studied the data of more than 10 hours of fcMRI scans of nine young, healthy participants, collected in 10 one-hour sessions for each person. Participants were asked to perform daily tasks or rested quietly during the scans for the researchers to create a functional connectivity map of all participants neural activity.
Study findings were published in the journal Neuron.
A recent graduate from Dominican University (IL) with a bachelor’s in journalism, Melissa joined TriMed’s Chicago team in 2017 covering all aspects of health imaging. She’s a fan of singing and playing guitar, elephants, a good cup of tea, and her golden retriever Cooper.