Our long term goals are to understand the mechanisms by which modifications in the tissue’s microstructure transcend globally and modulate function and behavior

To find the “missing link” between behaviour and changes on the molecular, or cellular level, the Preclinical MRI lab develops pioneering functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques. fMRI is a non-invasive, powerful tool for studying various neuroscience and biomedical questions. Current fMRI methods work by performing indirect measures of neural activity by following changes in blood volume and oxygenation level that accompanies it. However, changes in blood flow, in addition to being an indirect measure, occur over a timescale of seconds, while neural activity occurs within a fraction of a single second. This difference in timescale points out an obvious limitation of current fMRI techniques – they are too slow to resolve many important processes in the brain. To address these issues, the team’s first steps, for which they have received support for from the European Research Council, have been focused on developing novel techniques that harness the power of MRI to perform direct measurements of neural activity on a much faster timescale. For instance, the team will use ultrahigh magnetic fields to image the dynamics of neurotransmitters in the brain. These various measurements will be performed in vivo using state of the art 9.4T and 16.4T scanners, in both anesthetised and behaving rodents.

Deciphering distributed neural circuits via advanced fMRI coupled with optogenetics

Complex behaviors ultimately arise from neural activity in widespread, distributed systems in the brain. We are interested in deciphering such networks in awake behaving rodents via optogenetics and advanced ultrafast fMRI. To achieve this goal, we are currently developing optogenetics- and MRI-compatible behavioral paradigms for awake rodents, as well as advanced ultrafast MRI acquisition strategies that will enable the resolution of relatively fast dynamics. The long term goals include the identification of distributed circuits and the investigation of their causal dynamics.

Functional MRI via non-BOLD mechanisms

The success of functional-MRI (fMRI) stems from its ability to portray active brain regions upon prescribing a specific task. However, fMRI relies on the Blood-Oxygenation-Level-Dependent (BOLD) mechanism, which is a surrogate marker for neural activity via neurovasculature couplings. A major goal of the Lab will therefore be to harness MRI’s versatility – especially at the ultrahigh fields – towards capturing signatures for neural activity more directly. Specifically, we are interested in detecting cellular swellings upon activation, as well as neurotransmitter releases in the activated regions. Both phenomena can be considered epitomes of neural activity, and their direct detection is expected to provide much insight into the nature of the ensuing activity. We are investigating these phenomena – as well as BOLD neurophysiology – via MRI coupled to orthogonal modalities such as optical microscopy and optogenetics, in numerous settings from organotypic cultures (where hemodynamics are absent) to in vivo rodents.

Microstructural determinants of functional modulations leading to behavioral changes in healthy and diseased CNS

Modulations in brain function (e.g., enhancements arising from plasticity or aberrations arising from neurodegeneration) are intimately correlated with underlying micro-architectural modifications in the neural tissues. We are interested in studying the links between the two, in vivo, in a longitudinal fashion in animal models of plasticity on the one hand and neurodegeneration on the other hand. We investigate functional modulations (such as neural network reorganizations) using optogenetics as the specific source of stimulation, and BOLD- and nonBOLD-fMRI as the functional readouts. We augment this functional information with advanced in vivo MRI methodologies that are selectively designed to probe even subtle changes in microstructures arising from plasticity or, conversely, neurodegenerative processes. We target microstructural changes in white matter, where we study variations in axonal size distributions (that govern the conduction velocity) as well as in gray matter, where we study changes in randomly oriented tissue components. We further aim to investigate the diagnostic potential arising from the identification of structural changes preceding functional/behavioral modifications.