Obama's BRAIN Initiative

On the 2nd April, President Obama has made a speech about a new initiative to study the brain. This new initiative is called BRAIN - Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies.This initiative has been inspired in the Genome Project. His speech can be seen here or read here.



For me, the most important remark was: "So there is this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked, and the BRAIN Initiative will change that by giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action and better understand how we think and how we learn and how we remember. " My work is close to this idea using, of course, medical imaging, so I am really interested in this initiative.




About the budget involved, it might be considerably smaller than the Genome Project (3.8 billion), but the announced kick-start for the project was about 100$ million, while for the Genome Project was 28$ million. This kick-start will fund projects in the scope of the initiative: 50$ million from DARPA, 40$ million from NIH and 20$ million from NSF. Private sector will also contribute about 158$ million: 60$ million from the Allen Institute for Brain Science, 30$ million from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, 28$ million from Salk Institute for Biological Studies and 4$ million from the Kavli Foundation, among others.

White House links: Blog, Fact Sheet and Infographics

The risk of medical imaging

In the last few years, there has been in the media several news warning to the effects of medical imaging which use ionizing radiation:

http://ps.columbia.edu/news/new-study-confirms-ps-researchers%E2%80%99-predictions-ct-induced-cancer-kids
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-05/arrs-roc041912.php
http://coloncancer.about.com/b/2010/12/06/do-ct-scans-cause-cancer.htm

The editor William Hendee of Medical Physics has written an editorial about this topic:
http://online.medphys.org/resource/1/mphya6/v40/i4/p040401_s1?view=fulltext&bypassSSO=1

Most professionals are actually worried that people start refusing to undertake medical exams. Do you think this will happen?

PhD: to do or not to do?

Following yesterday's post about post-docs, today I talk about PhDs. Most people finish their Master and want to land their first job, other think there is more than finding a job and feel that they have to learn more. These ones end up doing a PhD. If you should do or not, depends on the professional career you want to have. I have not regret at any moment to do a PhD, but maybe that is just me:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=180743

http://www.urch.com/forums/phd-economics/130858-top-5-reasons-do-not-do-phd.html

http://www.findaphd.com/student/study/study-16.asp

http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2012/may/03/phd-doctorate-higher-education-love-money

Do you think a PhD is a must or a over-qualification for your career?

Post-doc: industrial or academic?

After doing a PhD, it is time to start thinking what to do next. You can leave research, but if you decide that research is what you want to do, a post-doc is the natural path. You have to think about doing an industrial or an academic post-doc. Both options have advantages and disadvantages and one has to take into account that Europeans and Americans have different views.

I found some interesting articles about this topic, which can be read here:
http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/articles/10.1038/nj6989-324a
http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/board,28.0.html
http://blog.1degreebio.org/?bid=54
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2008_06_13/science.opms.r0800055
http://scienceadvocacy.org/Blog/2011/01/06/academia-vs-industry-a-former-postdoc%E2%80%99s-perspective/

What do you think? Do you know people which have taken different paths?

The Future of Health

Stanford has again a series of small lectures about the future of health.
Visualizing desire is one of these lectures:

The complete set of lectures is here:
http://www.youtube.com/course?list=EC32BC95C9D7E5959C

Image-Guided Surgery - the future

Medical Imaging meets Minority Report:


This application YScope was developed by a Portuguese company specialized in human interaction: http://www.ydreams.com/ 

More information:
http://www.ydreams.com/blog/2012/07/27/ydreams-and-lisbons-hospital-santa-maria-launch-revolutionary-app-in-the-health-and-tech-sectors/

Open Source Medical Record

When we get sick, we want to get the best medical treatment possible, specially when our case is a difficult one. This is what Salvatore Iaconesi did. He release his medical files in the internet in the hope to get more and better advice about his brain tumor. Furthermore  he cracked the medical files and converted to open formats so that everyone could use them. He had surgery this month and he is at the moment fine.

Is this the beginning of something new in medical imaging?


Links:
http://artisopensource.net/cure/
http://blog.ted.com/2012/10/02/how-salvatore-iaconesi-has-started-a-movement-for-open-source-medical-files/

The Human Brain Project

The European Commission has officially announced the selection of the Human Brain Project (HBP) as one of its two FET (Future and Emerging Technologies) Flagship projects. The new project will coordinate European efforts to address one of the greatest challenges of modern science: understanding the human brain.

"Understanding the human brain is one of the greatest challenges facing 21st century science. If we can rise to the challenge, we can gain profound insights into what makes us human, develop new treatments for brain diseases and build revolutionary new computing technologies."


"According to a recent report, nearly one-third of the European population is affected by some kind of psychiatric or neurological disease (anxiety, mood disorders, neurodegenerative disease, etc.)."

The promoting video is very instructive and I'm very exciting about the database with medical images, of course... I hope this project will be very successful!

Open-source journals

Among researchers, there has been great discussion about journals and their subscriptions. The main argument is that journals are making money easily: researchers write the articles and other researchers review them for free, while universities and institutes are paying expensive subscriptions fees to access those articles. Therefore, many researchers are turning their papers to open-source journals. In this case, the access to the articles is free, while researchers pay to publish their articles. As a open-source fan, I was always thinking how great it is that things are changing, until I read an opinion article from Simon Cherry. Simon Cherry is the new Editor-in-Chief of the journal, “Physics in Medicine and Biology”. The journal is one of the top-ranked biomedical engineering journals.I have talked with Simon Cherry about my work in conferences and I greatly admire him. Just last year, in Anaheim NSS/MIC conference, he was awarded "The Edward J. Hoffman Medical Imaging Scientist Award"and his speech was just great to hear!

Simon Cherry's article "Open Access and PMB"
Short article about his new role:
http://www.bme.ucdavis.edu/articles/2011/10/06/simon-cherry-editor-physics-medicine-biology/Si
Simon Cherry's Lab:
http://www.bme.ucdavis.edu/cherrylab/

20 years of fMRI

Functional MRI (fMRI) is a technique with 20 years. In medical imaging terms, it is now in its adolescence. To commemorate, the journal Neuroimage published an issue dedicated to this topic. It covers every aspect of fMRI from history, reviews, the future and even tools such as FSL and SPM. There are 100 papers to read!


The article "Twenty years of functional MRI: The science and the stories" is great to read because it takes us for a ride into the first years of fMRI. I put here an interesting example about the first fMRI image: "Belliveau used an approach involving two sequential injections of Gadolinium during time series EPI data collection to create maps of cerebral blood volume before and during visual stimulation. The subtraction of these two blood volume maps (active minus rest) produced the now iconic image on the cover of the November 1, 1991 issue of Science (Belliveau et al., 1991)."

As a still young researcher and not an MRI expert, I enjoyed reading about such details!

I recommend also the article "The future of fMRI in cognitive neuroscience". In this article, the neuroscientist describes the hopes he has for fMRI future and I couldn't agree more, specially with "Methodological rigor" and "Open science and data aggregation".


Links:
Twenty years of functional MRI: The science and the stories
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811912004223
The future of fMRI in cognitive neuroscience
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811911008949

Neuroimage Complete Issue
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/10538119/62/2