DTI
Snapshots of Life: Tracing the Fibers of Addiction
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Credit: John D. Olson, Paul W. Czoty Michelle Bell, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC
This may look like a light-hearted piece of string art, but it’s actually part of a very serious effort to understand what happens to the brain when it’s strung out on drugs. The image, one of the winners of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology’s 2013 BioArt competition, was created with an advanced form of magnetic resonance imaging called Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI).
DTI works by detecting the movement of water in the nerve cells of a living brain. By determining which direction water is flowing in axons, the long processes that convey signals to other neurons, researchers can figure out whether the neurons are stretching from the left to right side of the brain (red), top to bottom (blue), or front to back (green). This data is then used to construct a three-dimensional view of the brain and its connections.
