According to a paper just published, a new technique of functional MRI scanning (fMRI) could soon allow neuroscientists to measure brain activity far faster: Generalized iNverse imaging (GIN): Ultrafast fMRI with physiological noise correction
Authors Boyacioglu and Barth claim remarkable things for the technique:
We find that the spatial localization of activation for GIN is comparable to an EPI protocol and that maximum z-scores increase significantly... with a high temporal resolution of 50 milliseconds.
EPI, the current standard fMRI sequence, would have a temporal resolution of 2000 or 3000 milliseconds, so it's about 50 times faster.
Other super-fast fMRI methods already exist (e.g. this one I blogged about), but they've generally achieved speed only at a cost: they've had to either sacrifice spatial resolution to achieve that, or limited themselves to scanning only a small fraction of the brain, or have been more subject to random noise and hence less sensitive.
GIN, however, is said to cover the whole brain, with decent spatial resolution and signal-to-noise ratio. The data can be analyzed in exactly the same way as any other kind. So that's up to fifty times faster with no real drawbacks.
That would be truly revolutionary - as the major limitation of fMRI at the moment is that it's much slower than other methods of recording brain activity.
Check it out: this shows brain activation in response to simple visual stimuli, imaged with bog-standard EPI and GIN:
So this is a big deal... if it does work, I'm sure neuroscientists the world over will be lining up to buy Boyacioglu and Barth a GIN and tonic.
How does it work, and is it all it's cracked up to be? Well, I can't really say: the math is beyond me.
In essence, rather than scanning the brain in 3D, slice by slice (like this), GIN only scans one 2D slice, but then manages to reconstruct the rest of the brain in 3D from just that slice, using dark, forbidden magicks... I mean mathematics. The principle is called parallel imaging and it's been around for several years, but with image quality limitations that GIN claims to have overcome.
Perhaps my more technically-inclined readers will have more insightful comments.
Boyacioglu R, and Barth M (2012). Generalized iNverse imaging (GIN): Ultrafast fMRI with physiological noise correction. Magnetic Resonance in Medicine PMID: 23097342
