On Oct. 6, 2017, UC Berkeley researchers announced they had developed reimagined fMRI techniques and instruments to boost the resolution by a factor of 20. They used a $13.43 million BRAIN Initiative grant from the National Institutes of Health to build the NexGen 7T by 2019 to provide the highest resolution images of the brain ever obtained, able to focus on a region the size of a poppy seed.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, has transformed our view of the brain, allowing researchers to pinpoint areas associated with everything from depression and dementia to playing chess and engaging in sex.

Its key limitation, however, is resolution: Even the most powerful scanners, using strong 7 to 10 Tesla magnets (7T to 10T), can often only localize activity within a region measuring several millimeters on a side – the size of a grain of rice – that comprises some 100,000 individual neurons doing a variety of different things.

With the ability to pinpoint activity to within a volume 0.4 millimeters on a side, they will be able to image functional regions in which most neurons are involved in the same type of processing. The dimensions are key because the brain’s outer layer, the cerebral cortex, is composed of repeating microcircuits in the shape of columns of neurons that are 0.4 millimeters on a side and 2 millimeters long. In the visual cortex, for example, each column responds to a specific feature of the sensory world, such as the vertical edges of objects as opposed to the horizontal edges.

The ultra-high-resolution MRI will be able to zoom in on these columns and record their activity, and they will more easily connect these columns with studies of the activity of individual neurons.