7T ultra-high-field neuroimaging for mental health: an emerging tool for precision psychiatry?

26th January 2022

Irene Neuner, Tanja Veselinović, Shukti Ramkiran, Ravichandran Rajkumar, Gereon Johannes Schnellbaecher und N. Jon Shah

Mental disorders affect a significant proportion of the world’s population, and despite advances in neuroscience and improved understanding of neurobiological correlates, the number of people suffering appears to be increasing. This, of course, results in a considerable personal, social and economic burden.

Given the huge symptom diversity and complexity of mental disorders, a view has emerged within the psychiatric community that an individual approach is the most promising avenue for clinical transfer and personalised precision psychiatry.

However, to date, the establishment of truly personalised treatment has been limited as, due to technical challenges, our knowledge about the neurobiological basis of mental illnesses has mainly been based on findings resulting from evaluations of average data from certain diagnostic groups.

This study suggests that this could change substantially through the use of emerging ultra-high-field MRI (UHF-MRI) technology to characterise the particularities of individual patients.

Based on the measurement of resting-state networks at 7 Tesla MRI over the course of therapy in a naturalistic study of two depressed patients, this research demonstrates the feasibility of using UHF-MRI for capturing individual neurobiological correlates of mental diseases.

These findings indicate that UHF-MRI could be an invaluable tool with which to monitor patients, thus enabling a truly individualised and predictive clinical approach in psychiatric care.

Original publication: 7T ultra-high-field neuroimaging for mental health: an emerging tool for precision psychiatry?