We began our work in neuroimaging studies in schizophrenia in the late 1980′s in the Surgical Planning Laboratory (SPL), MRI Division, Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital. This research collaboration grew out of early conversations between Drs. Robert McCarley, Director of the Neuroscience Laboratory, and Professor and Chair of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School at Brockton VAMC, and Ferenc Jolesz, Holman Professor of Radiology and Head of the MRI Division, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. This research moved from CT studies in 1986 to MRI, with the latter studies put on solid ground in the late 1980′s with a Research Scientist Development Award (K01) from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to Drs. Martha E. Shenton, and Ron Kikinis’ arrival to the MRI Division in Radiology.

The Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory (PNL), Departments of Psychiatry and Radiology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, was founded in 2005, by Dr. Martha E. Shenton with Drs. Marek Kubicki and Sylvain Bouix. Dr. Shenton is the founding director and Drs. Kubicki and Bouix are founding Associate Directors of the PNL (Dr. Bouix accepted a position as a Professor in the Department of Software Engineering and IT, École de technologie supérieure ÉTS, Université du Québec, Canada in 2022 and remains an affiliated member of the lab). Dr. Yogesh Rathi is now the Associate Director. The research conducted in the PNL expanded greatly in the first few years to include a number of junior faculty, post-doctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students, from multiple disciplines, who are investigating the role of brain abnormalities in schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury (TBI), attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), velocardiofacial syndrome (also known as DiGeorge syndrome or 22q11.2 deletion syndrome), Treatment Resistant Depression (TRD) and William’s syndrome. Neuroimaging research in humans has been also complemented by several animal studies (including mice and non-human primates), where neuroimaging tools and measures developed at the PNL are being actively validated. The lab has been well funded through grant support from private foundations (e.g., NARSAD, Brain and Behavior Foundation), NIMH, NINDS, NIA, NIBIB, VA Merit Awards, CIMIT, and the Department of Defense. A more detailed list of specific awards can be found in information provided by investigators and the logos listed on the Sponsor page. 

Specifically, the PNL was part of a large Clinical Consortium,  INTRuST, where advanced MRI imaging tools were used to understand brain abnormalities in PTSD and TBI. The PNL is also actively involved in not only using MRI, but Positron Emission Tomography (PET) data to understand the role of tau pathology in living retired National Football Leagues (NFL) players and discovery of neuroinflammatory mechanisms at play in psychosis as well as aging (human and non-human primates). The PNL played a central role in the study of NFL and college players to diagnose chronic traumatic encephalopathy in-vivo, a neurodegenerative disease that currently can only be diagnosed post-mortem. Other exciting work done at the PNL includes using diffusion MRI to investigate  subconcussive blows to the head in elite professional soccer players and university hockey players. The PNL is also leading the effort to understand early psychosis with funding from the NIMH on understanding brain connectivity as part of the Human Connectome Project in Early Psychosis. Currently,  PNL is the large data processing, analysis, and coordination center as part of the Accelerated Medicines Partnership (AMP) in Schizophrenia (SCZ) Program that has as its goals to develop effective early interventions for those at clinical high risk for schizophrenia. A further goal is to develop predictive tools derived from data acquired from 42 sites around the world to test preventive treatments and to provide data in the NIH National Data Archive for use by the general research community.

The PNL and its members have been actively involved in developing several state-of-the-art computational and mathematical tools to solve problems in neuroimaging. Starting with analysis of shapes (from the subcortical regions of the brain) to looking into white matter connectivity, our tools have been well-recognized by the international community and are actively used worldwide (see our openly available software). In particular, our multi-tensor tractography algorithm for tracing white matter connectivity was one of the winners of the Fiber Cup Challenge held during the highly influential MICCAI 2009 conference. Our algorithm on robustly recovering the full diffusion MRI data from sparse samples was also one of the best performing algorithms among 16 competing methods from the community. Our recent effort on harmonization of diffusion MRI data from multiple sites and scanners also received several awards from the international community for the best performing algorithm. Several students, post-doctoral fellows and faculty have received national and international recognition for their contributions to the field of neuroscience and neuroimaging.