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27.05.2021 12:37
High-resolution view of the brain
Scientists at the University of Magdeburg are making unique image data sets from the MRT freely available to researchers all over the world
Scientists at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg have been using magnetic resonance tomography (MRT) to collect image data of the brain structures of a single subject with the highest spatial resolution ever measured on a living subject. The researchers are expanding the first ultra-high-resolution data set published in 2017 with a new publication in the renowned journal Nature Scientific Data, thus making these unique data sets freely available to scientists and the general public around the world for research purposes and beyond.
While the magnetic resonance tomography dataset published in 2017 showed the human brain 64 times higher resolution than the standard neuroscientific resolution and thus continues to be the world’s highest-resolution brain scan of a living person, the new dataset stands out for the fact that it contains 202 brain scans of the same test person from 66 different people Sessions over a period of more than ten years, which were recorded with the 7 Tesla MRI of the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology in Magdeburg.
“Thanks to the cutting-edge technologies available in Magdeburg and some of them developed here, as well as the scientific know-how, the spatial resolution and data quality are far superior to most studies,” estimates the medical technician Dr. Falk Lüsebrink, who was in charge of the project. “Because of the ultra-high resolution and the high quality, we were able to see structures that had never been identified in vivo before. We have prepared and merged over 240 GB of data for this data set. ” Lüsebrink explains that “in addition to the collection of data from the same subject over a period of more than ten years, the data set also contains different contrasts. These not only map the anatomy in different ways, but also the blood supply, microstructure and function. Some of the different contrasts have the highest spatial resolution of their kind and are therefore top class worldwide. “
The research team expects that this new unique data set will be used in many multimodal analyzes, e.g. B. to merge data for visualization and teaching, to create brain atlases or to examine the cerebral cortex. Since the data were collected over ten years, they can also be used, for example, to analyze changes in the volume of brain regions due to aging. In addition, the development of algorithms for noise reduction is made possible in order to increase the sharpness and thus the quality of the images, as these were recorded with different signal strengths.
“Our data, published in 2017, were downloaded more than 60,000 times and stimulated research in a wide variety of disciplines and even adorns the larger than life-size wall of the MRI Museum in Illinois, in which the first human MRI by Nobel Prize winner Paul Lauterbur is on display,” emphasizes Dr. Lüsebrink. “Of course we hope that the new data set will have a similar impact. Even if the curation of such an extensive data set with more than 35,000 files and a size of around 240 gigabytes is very time-consuming, the effort is worth it, because it not only helps with the structuring of the data, but of course also with the reusability by other researchers and Researchers and thus contributes to the conservation of resources and the sustainability of the research results. ”In this way, scientists around the world could use the data without restrictions without access to a magnetic resonance laboratory and advance their research area. The relevance of freely available data has been underlined again by the current pandemic and the associated lockdowns, including by MR laboratories.
Scientific contact:
Prof. Dr. rer. nat. habil. Oliver Speck, Faculty of Natural Science at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Institute for Physics, Tel .: +49 391 67-56113, E-Mail: [email protected]
Originalpublikation:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-021-00923-w – Current publication in Nature Scientific Data
https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201732 – Publication in 2017 in Nature Scientific Data
Additional Information:
http://open-science.ub.ovgu.de/xmlui/handle/684882692/61 – Link to the data
https://openneuro.org/datasets/ds003563/versions/1.0.1 – Link to the data
Features of this press release:
Journalists, scientists
Biology, medicine
supraregional
Research results, scientific publications
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