| Project Detail |
Fine brain structure imaging meets biophysics
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) can provide tissue metrics at the micron scale when combined with computational biophysical models. However, lack of data on the validity of these models across different cases currently hampers their clinical adoption. The MRStain project, funded by the European Research Council, aims to validate this approach on a large scale using brain sections from temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients. Aiming to integrate the obtained data into a new model for the identification of target brain areas for surgery, the project is expected to significantly improve the treatment of epilepsy and similar neuropsychiatric diseases. Besides allowing fine visualisation of the human brain microstructures, MRStain will develop a non-invasive alternative to current clinical standards.
Ex-vivo histology is the gold standard to investigate human brain microstructure. However, its invasive nature precludes its use in monitoring disease progression and the investigation of the pathophysiological origin of neurological disorders. MRStain will address this shortcoming by exploiting the sensitivity of the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) signal to estimate aggregated histological metrics in the human brain non-invasively. Like established histology staining methods (e.g. myelin-basic protein), MRStain will be sensitive to changes in cellular populations, axons, myelin, and iron. This will be achieved by augmenting the MRI measurements with computational biophysical models, which can disentangle tissue metrics at the micron-scale using the macroscopic spatial resolution (1–4 mm) of MRI. However, the clinical use of these models has not been employed because their validity and generalizability across disease trajectories has yet to be tested against the ex-vivo histological gold standard. |
