A Sharper View into the Brain: Researchers from Freiburg are the first to detect the exact border between two important brain regions
Click to enlarge. Caption see below.
The team of Dr. Tonio Ball at the Bernstein Center Freiburg and the Cluster of Excellence BrainLinks-BrainTools at the University of Freiburg report on these findings in the current issue of the journal Human Brain Mapping.
The team examined six healthy subjects in a 7-Tesla magnetic resonance scanner at the University of Magdeburg. These machines produce a magnetic field several times stronger than that of scanners usually employed in medical use. The stronger field produces a much more detailed image of structures in the human body. Only a few of these devices are available in Germany.
When examining their subjects in the scanner, the scientists made a surprising discovery: The border between the amygdala and the hippocampus was different from person to person, and there were even differences between hemispheres of the same brain. As this border is the place where the two regions exchange information with each other, these variations might also be responsible for differences in personality, the scientists write. In the future, these brain regions should be measured in detail when patients are examined for psychiatric conditions such as anxiety disorders. Furthermore, the study showed that standardized maps of the brain do not make much sense in the case of the amygdala and the hippocampus. These regions must be measured individually in each patient, the scientists state, in order to prevent attributing a piece of brain to the wrong region, which may lead to a false diagnosis.
Image Caption
The border between the important brain regions hippocampus and amygdala is visible in high-resolution magnetic resonance images as a fine, light strip (“amygdala-hippocampal border," AHB). Photo: AG Ball, Universität Freiburg
Original publication:
Derix, J., Yang, S., Lüsebrink, F., Fiederer, L. D. J., Schulze-Bonhage, A., Aertsen, A., Speck, O. and Ball, T. (2014), Visualization of the amygdalo–hippocampal border and its structural variability by 7T and 3T magnetic resonance imaging. Hum. Brain Mapp.. doi: 10.1002/hbm.22477
Contact:
Dr. Gunnar Grah
Science Communicator, Cluster of Excellence BrainLinks-BrainTools
Phone: +49 (0)761 / 203 – 67722
Fax: +49 (0)761 / 203 – 8059
E-Mail: grah@blbt.uni-freiburg.de