7T 100 micron isotropic MRI released View online
Dear friends of Lead-DBS
 
7 Tesla MRI of the ex vivo human brain at 100 micron resolution
In a major interdisciplinary and collaborative effort, the team around Brian Edlow, Bruce Fischl, Larry Wald, and Andre van der Kouwe at the Martinos Center of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston has scanned a brain of a 58-year old woman who had no history of neurological disease and died of non-neurological causes over 100 hours in their famous 7 tesla MRI.

A custom-built coil was used to acquire single-echo multi-flip Fast Low-Angle SHot (FLASH) data and it is well-known that the experts at Martinos work at – or better define – the highest state-of-the-art in magnetic resonance imaging.

Thus, it may well be possible that this scan is among the best ever produced of the human brain. Fortunately for the whole imaging and brain research community, the team graciously decided to make it openly available.

I was fortunate enough to be involved to create an additional version that was precisely warped into MNI space. In order to do so, we created a novel method that was recently added to Lead-DBS (see last newsletter) and is described in the preprint together with more information about the brain dataset here.
You can see the brain dataset in this series of videos on youtube, here.

The dataset is now included as a download in the install menu of Lead-DBS and I am sure that it will change the way we think about DBS imaging – or magnetic resonance imaging in general – forever.
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If you're also interested in the individual NIfTI files of the dataset, these can be found here.
The work was performed at/by the MGH Martinos Center, MGH Neurology, The FreeSurfer team, the MGH Coma Recovery Lab and us. It was supported by NIH, NINDS, NIBIB, NICHD, NIA, DFG, JSMF, the Rappaport and TBD foundations.
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A ton of fixes and smaller additions
 
We spent the last months on refining our deployment and github workflow and added a lot of small features and fixes to this new version of Lead-DBS. Some of the new things include:
  • You can now save a default view for the 3D viewer. This was actually realized by the first pull request of Simon Oxenford, who will join the netstim laboratory as a PhD student this September.
  • The ANTs, BRAINSTOOLS, dcm2niix, dicm2nii and DSI Studio binaries were updated
  • We refined FTR to TRK conversions
  • We fixed the way you can move the order of (multiple) patients in lead group projects
  • And there have been countless fixes throughout the software
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New coverarts
 
Figures that were made with Lead-DBS have been on two additional cover arts, namely on Biological Psychiatry (for Carlos Baldermann's OCD-tractography paper) and a Thieme book by William S. Anderson about Deep Brain Stimulation.

You can see all artwork and Lead-DBS publications that we know of on our website, here.
As always, feel free to connect with us via Twitter, ResearchGate, Slack, the Forum or Facebook.
…or fork/meet us on github to contribute directly!
 
Best regards on behalf of the Lead-DBS team,
 
Andy
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