Faculty from the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School will participate in a $1.5 million research project to develop and commercialize a new method for analyzing brain activity. The project will be led by neuroimaging scientists at Johns Hopkins and Copenhagen Universities and is part of the Obama administration's $100 million BRAIN Research initiative, to create the next-generation brain-imaging system that could unlock the secrets of illnesses, including dementia, Parkinson's, depression, and schizophrenia.
The Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative aims to vastly increase scientists’ understanding of the human brain and how it functions.
The Johns Hopkins grant “Imaging In Vivo Neurotransmitter Modulation of Brain Network Activity in Real Time” will work to develop transformative brain imaging that does not currently exist. The joint principal investigators of the project are Arman Rahmim, a chief physicist and imaging expert in the Departments of Radiology, and Electrical & Computer Engineering, at the Johns Hopkins University; Danish neuroscientist Albert Gjedde, professor of Neurobiology and Pharmacology at the University of Copenhagen; and Dean F. Wong, professor of Radiology, Psychiatry, and Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Environmental Health Sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Wong also holds a joint appointment as professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.
Wong and Gjedde were pioneering team members in the 1983 to 1986 PET (positron emission tomography) human brain imaging of dopamine receptors that is currently the most direct and specific way to capture chemical signatures in the brain that can explain diseases and behavior.
The funding will be used to develop, over three years, a noninvasive method of measuring human brain neuronal activity and chemical changes in real time. The system will yield results that measure neuronal signals in milliseconds, not in hours as in current PET scans, and are much more sensitive to neurochemical processes than other imaging techniques, including fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recording of brain magnetic fields.
Current PET scan technology obtains images of brain activity by measuring the release of chemicals such as dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin. PET scans show the effects of these chemicals integrated over long periods of time, providing information that is useful in characterizing and treating a wide range of neuropsychiatric illnesses, but they do not show the neural firing of the brain in real times of milliseconds.
Wong compared the current state of PET technology to a traffic study that can tell when cars arrive at certain points but cannot document fender benders or detours along the way. The new technology, if successful, would be able to show that car's travel in detail. The result will be a vastly superior and insightful understanding of how both healthy and unhealthy brains work, said Wong.
"Most processes, whether in normal or abnormal brains, take place in the millisecond range, or less," he said. Understanding how the brain works, and how it reacts, could lead to vastly improved understanding of behavior and disorders, Wong said.
The team expects the three-year planning grant to yield a proof-of-concept, including pre-clinical trials, for a noninvasive system that would use light- and sound-emitting dyes to measure brain activity external to the skull and in three dimensions along with software to analyze the resulting information. It would resemble a helmet, with sensors that read brain activity as expressed in the action of the dyes.
The three aims involve the use of three different kinds of dyes: one containing light-emitting fluorescent materials sensitive to neuronal voltage changes, one that responds to changes in pH levels, and one that emits ultrasound signals.
Following the planning grant, the goal is to create a working machine within three to five years, with additional NIH funding and perhaps with industrial partnerships that would be secured with assistance from the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and the Technical University of Denmark.
“If successful, this technology could transform brain imaging. Aside from diagnostics, there is considerable potential research application across all brain science fields providing fundamental new understanding in the living human brain,” said Philip Phan, a co-investigator of the BRAIN Initiative and professor and executive vice dean at the Carey Business School. Phan played an instrumental role in bringing the Johns Hopkins grant partners together and will lead the efforts to develop a marketable imaging device from the prototype.