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Published February 1999 | public
Journal Article

Looking deeper into vertebrate development

Abstract

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a non-invasive imaging method that provides three-dimensional (3-D) images of the internal structure of opaque objects, such as humans and mice. In optimal situations, spatial resolution can approach the micron level. Arbitrarily oriented single-slice images can be obtained in seconds, with full 3-D volume images taking tens of minutes to collect. The exquisite sensitivity of MRI to the local physical and chemical environment provides a wide range of mechanisms giving rise to intrinsic contrast in the MR experiment, thus providing images with dramatic differences between different tissue types (e.g. white vs grey matter, myelinated vs unmyelinated fibres, and brain parenchyma vs ventricles). The recent advent of physiologically sensitive MRI contrast agents opens up a wealth of new avenues of study, even including the in vivo imaging of gene expression.

Additional Information

© 1999 Elsevier Science. We thank David Laidlaw for assistance with computational and visualization aspects of the DTI. This work was supported by the Beckman Institute at Caltech; by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; and by the Human Brain Project with contributions from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Science Foundation. E. T. A. acknowledges support from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Grant F32NS10384

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 18, 2023