The Evolution of fMRI Research in Neuropsychiatry

     In order to understand the insight that fMRI-based research has provided in the world of neuropsychiatry, it is important to understand how the use of fMRI has shifted over the years into a more insightful means of collecting data. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures changes in blood flow in the brain that is correlated with brain activity. fMRI creates a map of the brain's activity by illuminating which parts of the brain are stimulated during the scan. Although fMRI can illuminate a great deal of information about neuroscience anatomy and neural networks, experimental research has pointed out many of its flaws. These flaws in the application of fMRI in neuropsychiatry have fueled the research of many with the desire to improve fMRI in a way that can be of great benefit in the clinical and diagnostic processes of psychiatry. 

    Introduced to the work of Caterina Gratton and her colleagues in our Neuroscience Seminar I was blown away by their work but wanted to know more about the research that preceded their work and lead them to their investigation. In a paper titled “Defining Individual Specific Functional Neuroanatomy for Precision Psychiatry”, they tackled how the fMRI process could be improved to provide further insight into neuropsychiatric research. The most common limitations their team of research was focused on was the mistranslation due to inter-subject heterogeneity and a low standard of reliability in individual fMRI techniques. Caterina along with her team was surely not the first to discover these limitations. This thought motivated my further interest in other research that uncovered similar shortcomings in the use of fMRI.

    While Gratton and colleagues focused on a solution to correct some of the limitations of the fMRI process through the use of pfMRI (precision fMRI), other research was focused on why the traditional approach to fMRI was not sufficient in clinical applications for neuropsychiatry. Discover magazine's online article titled “What can fMRI Tell Us About Mental Illness?” uses the research article “Addressing reverse inference in psychotic neuro imaging: Meta-analyses of task related brain activation in common mental disorders” to explore how much fMRI can truly tell us about psychiatric disorders. The article mentions that the overall conclusion of the research carried out by Emma Sprooten and team is that: 

“the abnormalities and network-regions we can observe with fMRI reflect general conditions that facilitate the emergence and persistence of symptoms but are insufficient for explaining symptomatic variability across disorders”.  

    Data generated through their study was collected through the combination of 537 studies with an enormous number of participants, over 20,000 with a focus on five mental illness, schizophrenia, bipolar disease, major depressive disorder, anxiety disorders, and (OCD) obsessive-compulsive disorder. What was fascinating was that upon cross-examination there seemed to be very few observable differences between the patients across each category of illness. Sprooten’s et al. research is further backed up by the claims made for the importance of pfMRI research. One of their biggest arguments in the work carried out by Gratton et al. was the inability of traditional fMRI to accurately and independently identify patient-specific data that could be used toward their diagnosis and treatment, the same issue that is identified by Sprooten and her team. 

    When trying to tackle the complex material presented in neuroscience literature it is important to understand the basis of the research being conducted and how the researchers were lead down the path to the generation of their hypothesis. Exploring the work of Sprooten et al. illuminates more evidently the motive behind the work of Gratton et al. and further supports their path of development and application of precision fMRI.

References 

Sprooten E, Rasgon A, Goodman M, Carlin A, Leibu E, Lee WH, & Frangou S (2017).                                

    Addressing reverse inference in psychiatric neuroimaging: Meta-analyses of task-related brain

    activation in common mental disorders. Human Brain Mapping PMID: 28067006

Neuroskeptic. “What Can FMRI Tell Us About Mental Illness?” Discover, Discover Magazine, 14 Jan. 2017, 10:53 am, www.discovermagazine.com/mind/what-can-fmri-tell-us-about-mental-illness. 

Gratton, C. et al. Defining Individual-Specific Functional Neuroanatomy for Precision Psychiatry. Biological Psychiatry (2019).