USC awarded $3.2M for brain MRI study

Researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of California, Los Angeles have received a five-year, $3.2 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to lead an international MRI study of how eight common psychiatric disorders affect brain function. 

The Global Initiative for Harmonized Functional MRI in Psychiatry will analyze more than 94,000 resting-state functional MRI scans collected at 257 research sites in 27 countries, from participants aged four to 95 years old. The disorders covered are schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorder, and anorexia nervosa. 

The project expands the ENIGMA Consortium, an international brain imaging research network directed by Paul Thompson, PhD, associate director the school's Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute and the project’s principal investigator. Eight international research groups, each focused on one disorder, will process their scans with the same standardized pipeline so that findings can be compared across conditions, according to USC. Investigators also plan to use AI to search for subtle markers of illness. They will test whether the disorders group into the three families that genetic studies suggest, and examine how medications such as lithium and antipsychotics relate to differences in brain connectivity.