Re:What the brain's wiring looks like
by DrAwdeOccarim on Thursday July 06, 2017 @06:27AM
(#14709305)
It says it's 7T in the article?
7T is the Nottingham University scanner. Cardiff is 3T Connectom A. These are different sites / scans in the article.
In fact, 3T Connectom A is actually more optimized for Diffusion MRI / white matter tract tracing compared to the available 7T scanners due to its enormous 300 mT/m gradient.
In theory, the best of both worlds would be a 7T+ scanner with ultra strong gradient system such as the one developed by the HCP team, but such device does not exist yet AFAIK.
It is not exactly "hot news", as it is already in research use for several years already (in the US, at MGH). It is, still, however, pretty unique in a way that it was optimized for human in-vivo diffusion MRI (tracing of white matter pathways in alive human subjects :-).
Diffusion MRI scans which can be obtained by this scanner are of exceptionally high quality and resolution (spatial and angular), and contain lots of data that can be fed to mathematical models to infer fiber crossings, etc.
However, despite the high spatial and angular resolution it is still at least an order of magnitude short of what is necessary to capture local axonal connections and this type of imaging certainly does not tell you the direction the signal is flowing.
Still an important progress IMO.