MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging 2016 | Page 18

focus on clinical applications

Study Paves The Way For Clinical Application Of fMRI,
Opens Opportunities For Personalized Medicine
Researchers have reported a new technique that could contribute to improved presurgical planning, and ultimately could advance treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders
Functional MRI has revolutionized
our understandings of how the brain
works, offering ever deeper insights
into the neural underpinnings of a
range of behaviors. But because it
typically relies on averaged findings
from groups of subjects, it isn’t yet
established in the clinic, where the
focus is necessarily on the individual.
Now, the MGH Martinos Center’s Danhong Wang and Hesheng
Liu and colleagues have reported a
technique that could usher in a new
era of clinical fMRI by providing a
unique, personalized map of the
Hesheng Liu and Danhong Wang
different functional areas of an individual’s brain. They describe the agement of a range of neurological To this end, the authors of the Nature Neuroscience paper developed
technique in a Nature Neuroscience and psychiatric disorders.”
and tested a “cortical parcellation”
paper published in December 2015.
The cerebral cortex in humans is approach that can be used with
“There is an urgent need to devel- organized into distinct areas, each either resting-state fMRI data or
op individual-based neuroimaging of which is responsible for a spe- spontaneous activity extracted from
technologies to guide and facilitate cialized function that plays a role task-based fMRI data. This novel
personalized medicine,” said Liu, an in a larger, distributed network. We method begins with a cortical atAssistant Professor of Radiology at know, however, that there are differ- las derived from data from 1,000
Harvard Medical School and Direc- ences between individuals in how healthy subjects, Liu said, and iterator of the Laboratory for the Study these areas are organized. If we are tively finds the corresponding atlas
of the Brain Basis of Individual Dif- to fully understand the relationship in the individual subject by correlatferences at the Martinos Center. “By between anatomy and function, and ing fMRI signals from each vertex
identifying the functional architec- particularly if we are to apply this with atlas-based reference signals.
ture of the brain at the individual understanding to any of a range of The procedure incorporates a priori
level, our new fMRI-based tech- clinical needs, we need to be able to knowledge such as the distribution
nique could advance clinical ap- discern—precisely and reliably— of inter-subject variability in the
brain, which was estimated by Liu’s
plications including neurosurgical what those differences are.
lab in an earlier Neuron paper.
planning and treatment and man-