Brain Voyager ERC Grant

Rainer Goebel, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience of Maastricht University has been awarded a prestigious 2.5-million European grant for his research into the functional organization of the human brain. He is the first scientist of Maastricht University to be awarded an advanced grant from the European Research Council (ERC). His co-scientist, Alexander Sack, received a ‘starting grant’ from this same European Research Council earlier this year.

Goebel’s research builds on recent developments in high-field functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), as a result of which it is now possible to study brain functions at still higher resolutions up to the sub-millimeter level. This advancement in FRMI technique is of crucial importance because the functional units in the human cerebral cortex can be distinguished at this level of detail. These functional units are often organized as “cortical columns" that contain clusters of neurons with similar functional preferences.

In conjunction with this research, the Maastricht University is currently planning the development of a new neuro-imaging platform. This project, Brains Unlimited, facilitates the purchase of three new (ultra-)high field MRI scanners with magnetic fields of 3.0, 7.0 and 9.4 Tesla, respectively.

The ERC project will investigate what features are coded by the functional columnar-level units in the visual cortex, and how these entities can be derived from distributed activity patterns in specialized brain areas, such as the visual word form area and the fusiform face area. A model will then be developed to provide insight into the connections in and between those feature representations that enable the neuro-cognitive computations.

In this way, a ‘coding alphabet’ is developed for the columnar-level units in the cerebral cortex. For example, in the so-called fusiform face area in the brain, the basic features could code for face parts and their relative constellation, e.g. ‘shape of nose’, ‘distance between eyes’ and ‘color of lips’. Like words are formed from combinations of letters, different entities within a specialized brain area (e.g. different individual faces represented in the fusiform face area) would be coded by a specific distributed activity pattern across the area’s cortical columns.

Reading the columnar-level code would not only provide a new level of brain understanding, it would also allow building advanced brain computer interfaces (BCIs). These BCIs would substantial improve fMRI neurofeedback applications and fMRI-based communication and control tools. This would be most relevant for therapeutic treatment (e.g. depression) and for patients with severe motor impairments (e.g. locked-in syndrome).

The ERC Advanced Grant is a European grant that encourages and supports excellent, innovative investigator-initiated research projects by leading advanced research leaders. Since 2000, Professor Rainer Goebel has been heading the Cognitive Neuroscience section of the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience. An international review committee (QANU) awarded this section the highest ranking of all comparable research sections in the Netherlands. Goebel is internationally recognized for his focus on the synergy between method development and its applications, and for inventing and developing the software package ‘BrainVoyager’, which is used in more than 1000 laboratories throughout the world and is considered one of the standard software packages for advanced data analysis in neuro-imaging. He regularly stimulates cooperation with leading scientists worldwide that results in high-impact publications. From 2007 – 2009, Goebel was chair of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping.
http://www.unimaas.nl/

Source: Meuse Rhine Journal
www.meuse-rhine-journal.com

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