The Human Connectome Project and Beyond: Initial Applications of 300 mT/m Gradients

By J. McNab, B. Edlow, Thomas Witzel, S. Huang, H. Bhat, K. Heberlein, T. Feiweier, Kecheng Liu, Boris Keil, Julien Cohen-Adad and 4 more. NeuroImage, 2013

372 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The engineering of a 3T human MRI scanner equipped with 300 mT/m gradients – the strongest gradients ever built for an in vivo human MRI scanner – was a major component of the NIH Blueprint Human Connectome Project (HCP). This effort was motivated by the HCP’s goal of mapping, as completely as possible, the macroscopic structural connections of the in vivo healthy, adult human brain using diffusion tractography. Yet, the 300 mT/m gradient system is well suited to many additional types of diffusion measurements. Here, we present three initial applications of the 300mT/m gradients that fall outside the immediate scope of the HCP. These include: 1) diffusion tractography to study the anatomy of consciousness and the mechanisms of brain recovery following traumatic coma; 2) q-space measurements of axon diameter distributions in the in vivo human brain and 3) postmortem diffusion tractography as an adjunct to standard histopathological analysis. We show that the improved sensitivity and diffusion-resolution provided by the gradients is rapidly enabling human applications of techniques that were previously possible only for in vitro and animal models on small-bore scanners, thereby creating novel opportunities to map the microstructure of the human brain in health and disease.

Subfields: Epidemiology, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9b033a3f147a7e3194ceea0c78611cafc4451d7a

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In Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

Citations in the corpus

Population-Averaged Atlas of the Macroscale Human Structural Connectome and Its Network Topology (2018, background): “To date, diffusion MRI is the only non-invasive tool for mapping the 3D trajectories of human macroscopic white matter pathways (Fan et al., 2016; McNab et al., 2013), with preliminary success at resolving the normative pattern of several major white matter pathways (Catani et al.”
Advances in diffusion MRI acquisition and processing in the Human Connectome Project (2013, methodology): “Finally, it is useful to note the complementary aims of the efforts described here, by the “WU-Minn” HCP consortium, and the efforts of the “MGH-UCLA” HCP consortium (McNab et al., 2013; Setsompop et al., 2013).”
An integrated approach to correction for off-resonance effects and subject movement in diffusion MR imaging (2016, methodology): “Contents lists available at ScienceDirect NeuroImage j ourna l homepage: www.e lsev ie r .com/ locate /yn img An integrated approach to correction for off-resonance effects and subject movement in diffusion MR imaging Jesper L.R. Andersson ⁎, Stamatios N. Sotiropoulos”