Scientists at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to collect image data of brain structures of a single subject over a period of 10 years with the highest spatial resolution ever measured on a living subject.
The researchers are expanding an initial ultra-high-resolution data set published in 2017 with a new publication in the renowned journal Nature Scientific Data, making these unique data sets freely available to scientists and the general public worldwide for research purposes and beyond.
While the magnetic resonance imaging dataset published in 2017 depicted the human brain at 64 times higher resolution than the standard neuroscientific resolution and thus remains the world's highest-resolution brain scan of a living person, the new dataset stands out because it combines 202 brain scans of the same subject from 66 different sessions over a period of more than ten years, which were recorded with the 7 Tesla MRI of the Leibniz Institute of Neurobiology in Magdeburg.
The research team expects that this new unique data set will be used in many multimodal analyses, e.g. to merge data for visualization and teaching, to create brain atlases or to study the cerebral cortex. As the data was collected over ten years, it can also be used, for example, to analyze changes in the volume of brain regions due to ageing. 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.
Source: University of Marburg
