A multi-institutional consortium including Duke University has created startlingly crisp 3-D microscopic views of tiny mouse brains - unveiled layer by layer - by extending the capabilities of conventional magnetic resonance imaging.
"These images can be more than 100,000 times higher resolution than a clinical MRI scan," said G. Allan Johnson, Duke's Charles E. Putman Distinguished Professor of radiology and professor of biomedical engineering and physics. He is first author of a report describing the innovations set for publication in the research journal NeuroImage. View it online at http://tinyurl.com/2upj7n.
Images on the website for Duke's Center for In Vivo Microscopy http://www.civm.duhs.duke.edu/, which Johnson directs, reveal examples of these innovations in action. In one video two different mouse brains -- one from a normal animal and the other from a rodent missing a gene linked to mental abnormalities -- seem to assemble themselves before the viewer's eyes, structure by structure.
Watch the video with Johnson at http://realmedia.oit.duke.edu/ramgen/news/brain_imaging.rm (RealMedia) or http://quicktime.oit.duke.edu/news/brain_imaging.mov (Quicktime).
After building up like time-lapse photos of opening flowers, the side-by-side brain images begin revolving as overlying tissues dissolve into computer-rendered transparency. What remains visible, seemingly floating over the bases of the animals' skulls, are two color-coded brain structures -- the ventricles and hippocampus -- showing different volumes resulting from specific genetic differences.
Under funding from the National Center for Research Resources, the new imaging technologies are being developed and shared by six institutions that form the Mouse Bioinformatics Research Network (MBIRN).
Those six schools -- Duke, the California Institute of Technology, the University of Tennessee at Memphis, the University of California at Los Angeles, Drexel College of Medicine and the University of California at San Diego -- are connected via a very high speed network with each other as well as with the San Diego Supercomputing Center.