Big fMRS

Functional magnetic resonance spectroscopy (fMRS) broadly describes localized dynamic changes in cerebral metabolites in response to external stimuli or cognitive or physiological state-manipulation. fMRS is the only method that non-invasively measures dynamics of cellular metabolism and neurotransmission in the human brain. Reproducibility of fMRS results is confounded by heterogeneous experimental methods at several levels, including in the MRS acquisition, the experimental design and in data analysis. Identifying sources of variability is an important step to improve the reliability of the technique. This can ultimately help answer fundamental and critical questions in basic and clinical neuroscience to the benefit of society.

In the international collaborative project “Big fMRS”, we aim to establish the main sources of variability of fMRS acquisition and quantification, focusing on stimulus-derived glutamate response using single-voxel 1H-MRS. We seek international collaborators to participate in the big fMRS study to increase the diversity and ultimately the quality of the research, and to create a multi-site study. The collaborators are requested to acquire a dataset using either 1) predefined, mutually-agreed, and standardised acquisition parameters consistent across all participating laboratories (i.e. in terms of sequence and experimental paradigm) at 3T and or 7T, or 2) a fixed experimental paradigm, but with their own optimised acquisition scheme.

Objectives

The overall objectives of this work are: 1) to evaluate if fMRS measured increases in glutamate in response to neural activity induced by a visual stimulus are reproducible across multiple sites; 2) to provide an openly available dataset, and analysis pipelines for researchers; 3) to publish an extensive description of the collective dataset in a peer-reviewed journal; and 4) to create a standardised fMRS protocol. This will enable a better understanding of the sources of variability in the fMRS signal, and, ultimately, make fMRS a more reliable and powerful tool for basic and clinical research.

How to get involved

We are currently in the stage of finalizing the protocol for preregistration. If you want to contribute to that, or want to contribute data, please contact Betina Ip (betina.ip@ndcn.ox.ac.uk), Paul Mullins (p.mullins@bangor.ac.uk) or Anouk Schrantee (a.g.schrantee@amsterdamumc.nl).

Main team

Betina Ip, Paul Mullins, Anouk Schrantee, Saad Jbabdi, William T. Clarke, Adam Berrington, Francesca Saviola