all have a brain we're all worried about what we can do best to improve our education or

improve our health. And so we do a whole range of imaging projects that look at factors that

help the brain such as exercise and cardiovascular fitness, what types of things we should do

to improve our brain and also how diseases affect the brain so we have a lot of projects

looking at Alzheimer's, Schizophrenia and HIV and understanding how those affect the brain too.

Some of the biggest questions of our time are how you treat disease. If you

see a terrible disease such as cancer or Alzheimer's disease, one of the ways of seeing whether

treatments are working, and imaging, which is an area that NIBIB invests a great deal

in, is really a good record of whether treatments are working. We're all familiar with going

to the doctor and being told we're getting better or getting worse but imaging really

gives you a physical picture of what's going on, so that's an exciting area to study.

There's a really new type of imaging called diffusion MRI and it basically looks at the

wiring of the brain. And so if you were flying over Los Angeles or over Bethesda you'd see

a whole lot of freeways and could probably guess what was going on down below. If you

were on the ground you could see the functions of the different freeways and the different

stores. This imaging takes us from a sort of bird's eye view right down to the ground

where you can see all the physical connections between the axons. And a lot of diseases disrupt

those connections. So, neurogenetic disorders of childhood there's often disruptions in

the migration fibers and we can see those. And diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, there's a loss of

connections. So we're often able to reconstruct which parts of the brain are going wrong and

look at some of the therapies that are able to help them.

All over the world people are scanning people's brains right now, so if we were to plan a

project that scanned thousands or tens of thousands of people it would be very costly.

So one of the ways we save money is we work with people around the world. And one project

we do called Enigma, we collect data from 125 sites from around the world and they've

been scanning people with schizophrenia, bipolar illness, or depression. We try and put together

a detailed picture of what those illnesses do to the brain. And so it's actually quite

an interesting project. All of these things were begun independently and all the data

is coming to our lab, we're able to say which parts of the brain are affected by the diseases

and which treatments help.

We're all pretty unique, so even if we have

an average picture of Alzheimer's disease, for example, it'll just show you the typical

way it spreads in the brain. Now that can be very useful because you can compare an

individual to the database. You can say, "Well, you seem to be doing pretty well because the

brain loss is going less rapidly than in the database of people the same age." So I think

the notion is that you can make comparative statements about a new person's scan based

on all the collected data from other people and that can be very reassuring.