"• ""Neuronal fMRI"" will measure brain function in a much more accurate and specific fashion as compared to conventional methods. Undoubtedly the brain remains the most intriguing organ in the human body, and it's study requires techniques that can provide a fine and detailed look inside its function, in a non-invasive way, so that its mechanisms can be followed up along time by measuring as many times as needed without any harm. Since it’s composed by billions of neurons interacting in functional networks, we would need a global view of the whole brain, not only the microscopic detail of a synapse in a specific localization. And magnetic resonance provides not only a static view of the whole brain but also measurements about brain function and its dynamics non invasively. Besides the mentioned traditional advantages of MRI, being non invasive, versatile and measuring the whole brain at once, this new technique proposed here will provide measurements of brain function tightly linked to the neuronal activity (as opposed to the conventional method BOLD, which relies on the vascular tree response), thus taking MRI to the level of detail of optics while avoiding the light diffusivity in the tissue.
• If we, as a society, would like to alleviate the mortality or improve the life conditions of patients of neurodegenerative diseases, cerebrovascular accidents or brain cancer amongst many others, we need to start by understanding how the healthy brain works in order to have a baseline reference. In addition, deeper knowledge about the brain function will open up new possibilities for brain-computer interfaces and a wide range of technological developments.
• Therefore, our aims are to obtain more accurate and better localized signals of brain function through magnetic resonance, and to scan at accelerated sampling rates since the events we are targeting happen at the scale of tenths of milisenconds. To validate the methodology we will study the auditory pathway, which has very complex dynamics and also presents a very special spatial pattern, where different frequency stimuli are processed in adjacent brain layers (tonotopy)."
