Talk given by Dr. Mladen Barbic Howard Hughes Medical Institute - Janelia Research Campus Ashburn, VA USA Abstract: Non-invasive functional 3D neural imaging leading ultimately to the single cell activity spatial and real-time temporal resolution is of tremendous interest to the neuroscience community. Presently, there is no technique to directly measure neural activity in 3D non-invasively with cellular spatial and temporal (on the order of milliseconds) resolution. The challenges to overcome for reaching this “Holy Grail” of neuro-imaging are rather complex and multifaceted. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and functional-MRI (fMRI) satisfy the “non-invasive” requirement (although at the cost of imaging neural activity indirectly), and significant advances have brought these techniques to the levels of approximately millimeter cubed spatial resolution and time resolution on the order of seconds. These numbers, while impressive, are still orders of magnitude away from the cellular spatial dimensions of ~10 microns and the temporal resolution of neuronal action potentials on the scale of milliseconds. EEG and MEG also satisfy the “noninvasive” requirement and their time resolution is in the desired milliseconds range, but they do not provide the needed anatomical correlation and 3D localization. I will argue that the recent advances in novel magneto-caloric materials developed for entirely different and unrelated purposes provide a great opportunity to apply these materials to the problem of direct functional imaging of neural activity in the MRI settings. More specifically, the extremely sharp magnetic transitions these materials have at both the brain temperature and at the large DC magnetic field value match (almost serendipitously) the required conditions for functional MRI labels. I will state the remaining challenges and opportunities in this field and present the research path we are pursuing towards functionalizing these materials as labels in brain activity imaging. Biography Mladen Barbic received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Physics at the University of California, San Diego, in 1995 and 2000, respectively. He was a Post-Doctoral Scholar in Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology. From 2003-2008, he was an Assistant Professor of Physics at the California State University, Long Beach, as well as a Visiting Associate Faculty at the California Institute of Technology. In 2008 he was invited to join the Applied Physics and Instrumentation Group at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute - Janelia Research Campus where he works on the development of novel micro-devices for in-vivo electrophysiology. He maintains an active research interest in new optical, electrical, and magnetic resonance imaging technologies.

This event is part of the eventgroup INT Talks

Homepage
https://www.int.kit.edu/events.php

Speaker
Dr. Mladen Barbic

Howard Hughes Medical Institute - Janelia Research Campus
https://www.janelia.org/people/mladen-barbic

Organizer
Prof. Mario Ruben
Institut für Nanotechnologie
KIT
Hermann-von-Helmholtz-Platz 1
76344 Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen
Mail: mario ruben ∂does-not-exist.kit edu
https://www.int.kit.edu/1938_mario.ruben.php

Targetgroup
Interested / Everyone