About Us

Our Mission

The brainstem, though occupying only about 2% of the brain volume, is a highly complex and functionally critical hub regulating sensorimotor, cognitive, emotional, autonomic, and vital homeostatic processes. Its selective dysfunction is implicated in many prevalent psychiatric, neurological and neurodegenerative diseases. Because brainstem structures are often among the earliest affected in disease, in vivo human brainstem imaging holds substantial clinical promise for early diagnosis, biomarkers of progression, novel insights into disease mechanisms, and novel therapeutic targets. Yet, the brainstem is often ignored in clinical practice or clinical and cognitive neuroscientific research as its investigation requires non-standard brain imaging methods. Historically, human brainstem research has been limited by the small size, deep location, and heterogeneity of its structures. Recent advances in MRI—especially ultra-high-field imaging, but also improved imaging sequences at lower field strengths, biologically tailored contrast mechanisms, and dedicated analyses approaches now make submillimetre, in vivo brainstem imaging feasible also in clinical applications.

Our Action will bring together a critical mass of experts to foster this translation from methods development to clinical practice as well as aims to support new methodological and scientific developments in our understanding of the human brainstem.

For this we have created 5 Working Groups which will work together to address 5 main challenges which limit the current potential of brainstem MRI:

1. Provide harmonization and establish best practices in current brainstem MRI methods (e.g. Which imaging sequence is best for the substantia nigra at 1.5T, 3T, 7T?)

2. Make best practices in brainstem MRI methods and current knowledge on brainstem function available to researchers and clinicians (We will develop tutorials with practical exercises so that you have an easy start using brainstem MRI)

3. Bring together experts to create new knowledge and methods for the brainstem (e.g. We need to reduce uncharted areas - currently only about 25% of the brainstem is accessible in human brainstem MRI)

4. Bring together clinicians and methods experts to support user oriented methods development (e.g. Clinicians will bring their wishlist of structures which need characterisation to postmortem anatomists and imaging experts)

5. Bringing together researchers using brainstem MRI in order to create Big Data necessary for establishing the reliability of brainstem MRI measures (e.g. How much data do we need to reliably identify interindividual differences in noradrenergic locus coeruleus in depression?)