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Supporting the Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory
An important message from the Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory's Director,
Martha E. Shenton, Ph.D.
Dear Visitor,
In the last decade, leading-edge neuroimaging techniques have led to more findings about schizophrenia's impact on the brain than the previous 100 years of research.The Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory (PNL) has played a critical role in these all-important findings.
The PNL's mission is to understand brain abnormalities in psychiatric disorders. A primary focus is on schizophrenia - the most severe and debilitating of all psychiatric disorders.
The PNL has pioneered in developing and applying the most advanced neuroimaging techniques to discover brain alterations. Largely due to the rapidly developing field of neuroimaging, these advances have made it possible to spot small but important brain alterations that could not be observed previously.
The PNL is a new laboratory, founded in 2005. However, research has been ongoing by the PNL's team since the mid-1980s.
In order to continue its important mission, the PNL needs financial support. Currently, the PNL is funded primarily from federal sources. We are most grateful, however, for tax-deductible donations. Such donations are critical for very early stages of research not generally supported by federal sources, but which enable more rapid advances.
Your Support is Critical!
A Highly Talented Interdisciplinary Team Explores the Brain in Psychiatric Disorders
The PNL recruits researchers from all over the world, including the US, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. The research team is interdisciplinary and the PNL is fortunate to have truly gifted neuroradiologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, computer scientists, biomedical engineers, biochemists, and geneticists. They bring unique skills and knowledge in applying novel imaging techniques.
Innovative Ways of Looking at the Brains of Patients with Schizophrenia
The PNL, along with its collaborators, develops and applies new imaging techniques to understand cognitive and clinical abnormalities in schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) makes it possible to evaluate the shape and volume of brain structures. Diffusion Tensor Imaging enables the evaluation of the white matter tracts in the brain in order to help us understand how white matter connections become disrupted in these disorders.
Additionally, combining gene data with cognitive and behavioral data, along with imaging data, is a relatively new and important area of research that will shed light on how genes are involved in brain development and function, and the role they play in psychiatric disorders.
Breakthrough ideas come from the kind of collaborative work that our research scientists do every day, where they pursue new research directions that lead to new areas of discovery about the brain and behavior.
New Approaches to Disseminating the Fruits of Our Research
The PNL is also committed to disseminating the fruits of its collaborative research through traditional medical publications and conferences, as well as through web-based publication, open-source software distribution, and community-based software development.
In this capacity, the PNL works closely with the Surgical Planning Laboratory to ensure that imaging tools developed in the PNL, and/or in conjunction with the Surgical Planning Laboratory, are made available to other researchers, across the world, at no cost.
Only Private Funding Can Insure Continued Breakthroughs
The majority of the PNL's work is funded through grants from the federal government. While government sponsorship is critical for the PNL's ongoing research and clinical studies, it is not well suited for initiating new projects or for encouraging new ideas - precisely the kind of approach that researchers in the PNL are most interested in pursuing.
The cumbersome nature of federal applications, and the long review process, further delays some of the newest developments in applying neuroimaging techniques. To foster early stages of truly innovative research, we critically need the support of private funding.
What You Can Do to Advance Vital Research into Schizophrenia and Other Debilitating Disorders
As mentioned earlier, our research has helped lead to more findings about the brain in schizophrenia in the last decade than in the previous 100 years. We are also using our neuroimaging techniques in studies of other debilitating psychiatric disorders.
If you share our vision of the importance of our research, we encourage you to work with us to make it happen. Our parent institution, the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, provides ways for foundations, groups, and individuals to donate money directly to support the Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory and its mission.
If I can answer any questions or provide additional information, please contact me directly at 617-525-6117, or via email at shenton@bwh.harvard.edu
Thank you for your interest and your support.
Sincerely,
Martha E. Shenton, Ph.D., Director of the Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory
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| The picture above is an example of the kind of information that can be extracted from a living brain using Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI). DTI is used to reveal white matter fiber bundles in the brain. This new technology helps us to understand better white matter connections in the brain and how they are altered in psychiatric disorders. The colors in the figure on the left highlight different fiber bundles. More specifically, the brown fiber bundle shows the corpus callosum, the largest white matter tract in the human brain, and which connects the two hemispheres. |