Please join us for a special guest seminar by Dr. Mark M. Schira of the University of Wollongong on:

“The Human Brain Atlas at 3T and 7T for adults and children” 

Abstract. Virtually all major discoveries in neuroscience for the last 100 years have been underpinned by an increasingly detailed understanding of the architecture and connectivity of the central nervous system. We introduce HumanBrainAtlas, an initiative to construct highly detailed, open-access segmentations of the living human brain. Combining high-resolution in vivo MR imaging and in-depth delineations previously only available on histological preparations. Here, we present and evaluate the first step of this initiative: a comprehensive dataset of two healthy male volunteers reconstructed to a 0.25 mm isotropic resolution for T1w, T2w, and DWI contrasts. Multiple high-resolution acquisitions were collected for each contrast and each participant, followed by averaging using symmetric group-wise normalisation (Advanced Normalisation Tools). The resulting image quality permits structural parcellations rivalling histology-based atlases, while maintaining the advantages of in vivo MRI. For example, components of the thalamus, hypothalamus, and hippocampus are often impossible to identify using standard MRI protocols—can be identified within the present data. We have also developed a more participant friendly protocol achieving 0.5 mm resolution compatible with children and some patients.

Speaker Bio. Dr. Schira is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Psychology at the University of Wollongong and a Senior Research Officer at the Neuroscience Research Australia in Sydney. He received a Dr. rer. nat. (Doctorate in Natural Sciences) in Human Neurobiology from the University of Bremen and Charité; University Hospital in Berlin, under the supervision of Prof. Manfred Fahle and Prof. Stephan Brandt. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Christopher Tyler at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco and with Michael Breakspear and Branka Spehar at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Since 2013 he is supervising his own research group in systems neuroscience focusing on the function, organization and imaging of human visual cortex.

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Please contact Noah Benson (nben@uw.edu) with any questions.