Brain scan might determine your age within a year

Scientists are using structural MRIs on hundreds of people ages 3 to 20 to assess age. More than 92 percent of the time, it turns out, those scans don't lie.

If you're prone to lying about your age, steer clear of structural magnetic resonance imaging. When used to scan your brain, no matter how good (or bad) you may look, a new imaging technique that uses MRI won't lie. In fact, it probably knows your age to the exact year.
"We have uncovered a 'developmental clock' of sorts within the brain -- a biological signature of maturation that captures age differences quite well, regardless of other kinds of differences that exist across individuals," Timothy Brown of the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine says in a news release.
Brown and researchers from nine other universities report today in the journal Current Biology that MRI scans of 885 people from age 3 to 20 were able to identify 231 biomarkers which, when analyzed together, determined age with more than 92 percent accuracy. That's the highest of any biological measure used to date, they say.
Maturation timing, they write, turns out to be "tightly controlled."
The team says it achieved this unprecedented accuracy by combining all 231 biomarkers instead of analyzing them one by one. Brown adds that the "regularity in this maturity metric among typically developing children suggests that it might be sensitive to detecting abnormality as well."

 

 

 

Faster brain scans offer new perspective on brain activity

Magnetoencephalography allows researchers to observe neural activity with frequency waves that are faster than 50 cycles per second.

Our brains are mysterious organs. And fast. Too fast, it turns out, to be fully observed using the current gold standard: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
So researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Institute of Technology and Advanced Biomedical Imaging at the University of Chieti in Italy are turning to faster technology called magnetoencephalography (MEG) to sample neural activity every 50 milliseconds.
In doing so, they've been afforded novel insights into the inner-workings of neural networks in resting and active brains. As the researchers report in the journal Neuron, these new insights could help us better understand how brain networks function and, in turn, better diagnose and treat brain injuries.
"Brain activity occurs in waves that repeat as slowly as once every 10 seconds or as rapidly as once every 50 milliseconds," said senior researcher and neurology professor Maurizio Corbetta in a school news release. "This is our first look at these networks where we could sample activity every 50 milliseconds, as well as track slower activity fluctuations that are more similar to those observed with functional magnetic resonance imaging. This analysis performed at rest and while watching a movie provides some interesting and novel insights into how these networks are configured in resting and active brains."
The scientists observed brain activity in two groups of volunteers: one that was either resting or watching a movie during the scans, and another that was watching a movie and looking for event boundaries -- i.e., points at which the plot or some element of the story changed.
The scientists initially used fMRI to locate several known resting-state brain networks, which are characterized by activity levels that rise and fall in sync when the brain is at rest. They were surprised to see that the spatial pattern of activity, which they call topography, was similar regardless of whether the brain was active or at rest. Still, fMRI limited their ability to observe activity that changed faster than every 10 seconds.
When they turned to MEG, which enabled them to detect activity with frequency waves faster than 50 cycles every second, the higher "temporal resolution" showed that when the volunteers went from resting to watching a movie, these networks actually shifted frequency channels, which indicates that our brains may use different frequencies for rest versus activity.