According to a paper just published, a new technique of functional MRI scanning (fMRI) could soon allow neuroscientists to measure brain activity far faster: Generalized iNverse imaging (GIN): Ultrafast fMRI with physiological noise correction
Authors Boyacioglu and Barth claim remarkable things for the technique:
We find that the spatial localization of activation for GIN is comparable to an EPI protocol and that maximum z-scores increase significantly... with a high temporal resolution of 50 milliseconds.
EPI, the current standard fMRI sequence, would have a temporal resolution of 2000 or 3000 milliseconds, so it's about 50 times faster.
Other super-fast fMRI methods already exist (e.g. this one I blogged about), but they've generally achieved speed only at a cost: they've had to either sacrifice spatial resolution to achieve that, or limited themselves to scanning only a small fraction of the brain, or have been more subject to random noise and hence less ...
