Function BIRN
The Function BIRN is working to understand the underlying causes of schizophrenia and to develop new treatments for the disease. The effort brings together researchers in different aspects of functional neuroimaging to apply recently developed multi-modal and interdisciplinary techniques to investigate the neural substrates of schizophrenia. The scientific goals of the project are to determine the role of frontal and temporal lobe dysfunction in schizophrenia, and to assess the impact of treatments on functional brain abnormalities.
Goals
The goal of the Function BIRN project is to develop and validate a common functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) protocol for a large-scale multi-center study of schizophrenia.
The Function BIRN has two major goals:
- Technological: The technological goal is to develop a distributed network infrastructure that will support the creation of a federated database consisting of large-sample fMRI datasets contributed by the 10 centers.
- Clinical: The clinical goal is to study brain function in schizophrenia with fMRI. Specifically, the focus is to use fMRI technology to study specific regional brain dysfunction as well as changes in brain function in the progression and treatment of schizophrenia.
Participants
- Brain Imaging Center, UC Irvine
- Brain Imaging and Analysis Center, Duke Univ.
- Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital
- Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, University of Minnesota
- Center for Neuroimaging of Neurodegenerative Diseases, UC San Francisco
- Department of Psychiatry, UNC at Chapel Hill
- fMRI Research Center, UC San Diego
- Laboratory of Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience, Yale University
- Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, UC Los Angeles
- Lucas Center, Stanford University
- Mental Health Clinical Research Center, Univ. of Iowa
- MIND Imaging Center, UNM School of Medicine
- Neuropsychiatric Imaging Laboratories, Duke Univ.
- Surgical Planning Laboratory, Brigham & Women's Hospital
Research
The Function BIRN is working on:
- Standardizing and calibrating equipment and imaging activation paradigms across sites using mechanical and human phantoms
- Collecting imaging data using the consortium fMRI protocol on populations of persons with schizophrenia at different sites
- Combining unique imaging data collected with diverse activation methods into the federated database.
