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Research

Basic research
Majority of scientific output with AMI Centre data comes from research groups using AMI Centre facilities. A comprehensive list of these publications, dissertations and talks are available in the annual reports.	Picture 1. Courtesy of Linda Henriksson
Technical and Methodological research
The technical development work carried out at the AMI Centre aims at building new hardware and software for (f)MRI-related applications and at improving existing equipment to aid the users of AMI Centre in their scientific work. This work is done in collaboration together with the personnel of AMI Centre, mainly with scientists from the Brain Research Unit (Aalto University) and from the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Computational Science (Aalto University). The AMI Centre personnel are also constantly providing teaching and consultation of the advanced research methods to our users. The technical/methodological research done in the past is detailed in the annual reports.	Picture 2. Courtesy of Linda Henriksson
Picture 3. Courtesy of Teemu Rinne	Currently, we have intensified the methodological development of MR pulse sequences by recruiting a postdoctoral fellow in physics with Centre-of-Excellence funding, provided for the CoE in Systems neuroscience and neuroimaging. The project studies the usage of steady-state free precession sequences in functional MRI data acquisition. In our internal physics journal club, we aim to study and screen the most recent methods in (f)MRI field. This is done in collaboration with our active users, so that all the work done for methods development would benefit all the users of AMI Centre in the best possible way (with new analysis tools, for example).
We have recently acquired a new 16-channel head coil providing an estimated 30% better SNR along with increased imaging acceleration factors for basic fMRI studies in comparison to our 8-channel head coil. In fMRI, increased number of receiving coil elements is pivotal in developing parallel imaging methods as well as improving the overall spatial and temporal resolution of fMRI. One potential method for increasing the temporal resolution of whole-head functional volumes to as high as 100 ms in comparison to traditional 1-2 s sampling rate, would be to use magnetic resonance Inverse Imaging (InI). In InI, however, the gain in temporal resolution means losses in spatial resolution. Our 16-channel coil will pave the way for implementing this type of methods in the future.