Autism and Big Science
The MNI-152 is a database that defines the “normal” adult brain. It was built by Alan Evans, a professor of biomedical engineering, and by Bruce Pike, a Killam Professor in neurology, at McGill University. Pike is the Director of the McConnell Brain Imaging Centre of McGill’s Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI), where Evans is also based; in 1993, they founded the International Consortium for Brain Mapping (ICBM), a partnership of four institutions (including MNI) which can collect and distribute “behavioural, imaging and clinical data from research sites around the world.” A large number of sample subjects was needed to construct the MNI-152 as “healthy brains differ in size and shape so dramatically that researchers had no model for normalcy—and to fully understand the abnormal (read: disease), you need such a benchmark.”
A story in the Fall 2006 McGill Headway (Volume 2, no. 1), This is Your Brain on Big Science: Far-reaching collaborations help crack the brain’s toughest problems profiles Evan’s and Pike’s work; they are now collaborating with six American centers to construct the “world’s first online brain imaging database of pediatric brain development”:
American researchers working on the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) Study of Normal Development project scanned the brains of more than 500 infants, children and adolescents, all carefully chosen to mirror U.S. demographics. Evans, Pike and MNI colleagues then compiled and analyzed the data to create a map of normal development in the growing brain. With this blueprint established, clinicians and scientists will be able to track abnormal development and fast-track early diagnosis.
“At what point does the development of the autistic brain diverge enough from the development of a normal brain that we can recognize it as being different?” asks Evans. “Then, when can we tell that this discrepancy is, say, autism, rather than some other disease or even demographic factor causing the variant? Now, we can see the difference at two years, but if we can push that back to, say, one year, children can be treated earlier, which will help their development enormously.”
Pike notes the importance of interdisciplinary and collaborative research in studying autism: “‘If I want to know the difference between an autistic population and a normal developing population, that’s not just about imaging or neurology……Ultimately it becomes a question of statistics, mathematics…….”—and, too, a number of other disciplines, psychology, psychiatry, genetics, and more.
Go here to see the McConnell Brain Imaging Centre’s anatomical model of a normal brain.
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POSTED IN: Diagnosis, Genetics, Neuroscience, Science
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