At The Mind Research Network (MRN), the lab of Dr. Vince Calhoun is making headway on a project investigating the “chronnectome” of the brain — an in-depth look at how regions of the brain change in connection with one another, and how that may relate to different diseases, particularly mental illness.
The brain can be divided into many different regions, each having their own unique functions. Since the brain is incredibly dynamic, it is changing to reflect that, Calhoun said.
According to one of Calhoun’s papers published in Neuron, even while a person is at rest their brain may be changing its internal connections due to small changes in someone’s state of mind. Through the use of MRI imaging, the lab particularly focuses on what is going on in the brain during periods of “rest,” when the subject is not asked to perform any kind of task.
One of the researchers in Calhoun’s lab, Ph.D. student Eswar Damaraju, said the major advantage of their approach is that instead of essentially lumping together all the brain scans collected in a person at rest by averaging them, their method teases out the changes in connectivity that can occur over that time. They have already identified several patterns of connectivity that reoccur across patients.
“We observed that these dynamic connectivity patterns can reliably be clustered into five to seven stable connectivity patterns that reoccur within and across subjects,” Damaraju said.
Calhoun said his lab has access to an archive of thousands of brain scans that can be used for this project, some of which are from patients with mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Damaraju said the lab has imaged the brains of 149 schizophrenia patients, and they are comparing connections in the brain of these patients with patterns observed in normal subjects.
“We show that they (schizophrenia patients) spend a lot more time in one of the states than the healthy control subjects,” said Calhoun. “So there’s a lot of interesting findings there.”
Calhoun said he hopes that the chronnectome project can be used to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of patients with mental illness, providing information on a specific person’s illness and how best to treat them on an individual basis.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, while schizophrenia only afflicts about 1 percent of the population, nearly 20 percent of U.S. adults suffer from some form of mental illness.
“That’s really one of our main goals, is really trying to come up with biomarkers of mental illness to help us better categorize mental illness,” Calhoun said. “So, for example, it might be that there are several types of schizophrenia illness and some will respond better to certain medications than others.”
This project could also provide a way to evaluate the effectiveness of different treatments as it may offer insight beyond the symptoms of the patient and into the actual cause of the disorder.
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“A symptom is a manifestation of the illness, but it’s not the illness. So what we’re doing is we’re giving people medications to address symptoms, but we’re not treating the cause,” Calhoun said. “We’re still in the Dark Ages in dealing with mental illness.”
Since the analysis of MRI images is highly mathematical, much of the analysis for this project will be performed by Daisy Reyes, an applied math major at UNM. She said she is looking forward to working on the project.
“I am quite nervous and excited at the same time. Nervous because this project will be something I have never done before, so I do not know what to expect. However, I know that it will give me an opportunity to see how math is used in the real world,” Reyes said. “I am excited because I will be working with data from real subjects and actually trying to see if there are any patterns, and making discoveries.”
Lauren Topper is a freelance reporter at the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at news
@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @lauretopps.
