About the Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory

Research Summary

Research work involving the investigation of brain abnormalities in schizophrenia has progressed considerably over the past decade and a half largely due to the improved spatial resolution of MR images and to new image processing tools used to extract information from MR scans. We now know that the temporal lobe, particularly the amygdala-hippocampal complex, parahippocampal gyrus, and superior temporal gyrus, are implicated in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. These brain regions are also correlated with gray matter volume reductions in prefrontal cortex, suggesting that brain regions involving temporal-frontal connections may be importantly involved in schizophrenia.

Our work has now led us to evaluate patients early in the course of their illness, as well as to evaluate individuals with schizotypal disorder who share some of the features common to schizophrenia but without psychosis, and without some of the confounding effects observed in schizophrenia studies such as medication and duration of illness (chronicity). We have also expanded our work to fMRI to evaluate both cognitive and structural brain regions involved in schizophrenia, and we have also taken advantage of a recent technology, diffusion tensor imaging, to evaluate white matter fiber tracts in the brains of psychiatric patients and controls.

Our work has also led us to work on problems involving the coregistration of multimodal imaging techniques such as MRI, fMRI, and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Such studies should further our understanding of schizophrenia, a disorder that not only afflicts just under 1% of the general population, but which also accounts for the use of more hospital beds than any other health problem other than diseases associated with aging.