Two Acceleration Methods Allow For Much Faster MRI Brain Scans An international team of physicists and neuroscientists has reported a breakthrough in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that allows brain scans more than seven times faster than currently possible. In an article published December 20, 2011, in the journal PloS ONE, a University of California (UC) Berkeley (USA; http://berkeley.Edu), physicist and colleagues from the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities [Minneapolis-St. Paul], USA; www.umn.edu) and Oxford University (UK; www.ox.ac.uk) described two developments that allow full three-dimensional (3D) brain scans in less than half a second, instead of the typical two to three seconds.When we made the first images, it was unbelievable how fast we were going, said first author Dr. David Feinberg, a physicist and adjunct professor in UC Berkeleys Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and president of the company Advanced MRI Technologies (Sebastopol, CA, USA). It was like stepping out of a prop plane into a jet plane. It was that magnitude of difference. For neuroscience, in particular, fast scans are vital for capturing the dynamic activity in the brain. When a functional MRI [fMRI] study of the brain is performed, about 30 to 60 images covering the entire 3D brain are repeated hundreds of times like the frames of a movie but, with fMRI, a 3D movie, Dr. Feinberg said. By multiplexing the image acquisition for higher speed, a higher frame rate is achieved for more information in a shorter period of time. The brain is a moving target, so the more refined you can sample this activity, the better understanding we will have of the real dynamics of whats going on here, added Dr. Marc Raichle, a professor of radiology, neurology, neurobiology, biomedical engineering, and psychology at Washington University in St. Louis (MO, USA; http://wustl.edu), who has followed Dr. Feinbergs work.Because the technique works on all modern MRI scanners, the impact of the ultrafast imaging technique will be immediate and widespread at research institutions worldwide, according to Dr. Feinberg. In addition to greatly advancing the field of neural imaging, the discovery will have an immediate impact on the Human Connectome Project (http://humanconnectomeproject.org), funded in 2010 by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH; Bethesda, MD, USA) to map the connections of the human brain through fMRI and structural MRI scans of 1,200 healthy adults.At the time we submitted our grant proposal for the Human Connectome Project, we had aspirations of acquiring better quality data from our study participants, so this discovery is a tremendous step in helping us accomplish the goals of the project, said Dr. David Van Essen, a neurobiologist at Washington University and coleader of the project. Its vital that we get the highest quality imaging data possible, so we can infer accurately the brains circuitry how connections are established, and how they perform.The faster scans are made possible by combining two technical improvements devised in the past decade that separately increased scanning speeds two to four times over what was already the fastest MRI technique, echo planar imaging (EPI). Physical limitations of each method prevented further speed improvements, but