This was truly a special podcast to me in that it highlights one of the most exciting and important emerging areas in fMRI - that of imaging layer activity. The resolving of layer activity is so exciting because it opens up the prospect of determining the direction of communication between areas. Brain activity is so much more than just regions being activated but rather, regions sending information to other regions. This opens up the possibility to fully map these directional communication channels. Layer fMRI truly pushes the limits of fMRI and MRI, requiring high field, specialized hardware and pulse sequences, and specialized processing methods. Only a small handful of groups in the world are leading this charge. We talk about all of this and so much more and luckily have 4 of the leaders all in the same virtual room.

Guests:

Rainer Goebel is a full professor for Cognitive Neuroscience at Maastricht University. He’s been a fountainhead of innovation with fMRI and the creator of Brain Voyager. He has an ultra-high field imaging center housing 3, 7 and 9.4 T human scanners. He received his PhD from the Technical University of Braunschweig where he developed artificial deep neural networks to advance our understanding of visual processing computations. From 1995-99 he did his postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt in Wolf Singer’s department where, as is mentioned in the podcast, he was discouraged from doing fMRI - but his prescient vision of what fMRI may accomplish is coming to fruition today.

David Feinberg is a professor at Berkeley, a pulse sequence wizard and director of AMRIT (advanced MRI technologies) a research and development company in imaging. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley and did his postdoc at UCSF. He has been innovating the field forward with his insights into ways to tremendously accelerate acquisition speed.

Jon Polimeni a physicist and engineer at the MGH Martinos Center, has been working on all things cutting edge with MRI. He received his Ph.D. from Boston University in the Computation Neuroscience and Computer Vision Laboratory under Prof. Eric Schwartz. He did some of the very early seminal work on layer fMRI with some of the first convincing demonstrations.

Renzo Huber (@layerfMRI) , has devoted his career to layer fMRI, producing some of the seminal papers that have shown that this is a real thing. Along with his groundbreaking and deeply important work in developing novel high-resolution techniques that not only image at high resolution but are less sensitive to large vascular effects which limit functional resolution, he has established an incredibly valuable layer fMRI blog (layerfMRI.com), that among other things, includes a list of all papers and abstracts published in layer fMRI, available code and tutorials a discussion of common artifacts, a map of all 7T scanners throughout the world - now approaching 100, and a section on brain art. Before college, Renzo received all his education at the Waldorf School in Salzbug, Austria. If you don’t know what Waldorf schools are, look them up, we discuss this a bit in the podcast. He received his PhD under Bob Turner at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig and then I was lucky enough to have him carry out his postdoc in my group at the NIH. He is now working in Rainer’s center in Maastricht under Ben Poser.