The brainstem is hard to study with standard imaging because it is small, complex, and contains many tiny structures. We need to review current methods and identify as well as communicate best practices to establish standards in our scientific community.

The brainstem is one of the first brain regions affected in many neurodegenerative diseases, making it an important target for identifying early (prodromal) biomarkers.

Brainstem dysfunction is furthermore linked to numerous psychiatric and neurological disorders, but currently cannot be incorporated well into personalized treatments due to a lack of studies collecting data on the human brainstem. Recent MRI advances now make brainstem imaging feasible in standard clinical settings. We need to accelerate the translation from brainstem MRI methods development to clinical research and practice.

Despite promising approaches for investigating the brainstem in vivo in humans, there is still a lot of methods development to do in terms of e.g. mapping currently inaccessible brainstem structures and optimising imaging sequences to allow investigating them in a clinical setting. We need to establish an exchange between clinicians and methods experts for user-oriented methods development to target the most important open questions first.

We need to increase the community of researchers applying brainstem MRI, independent of their available MRI infrastructures. Our Action will build up brainstem MRI data repositories and develop training materials with practical hands-on examples in order to allow for more clinicians and researchers to use brainstem MRI in their work.