The Royal has received a $1.9 million grant from Brain Canada to launch a one-of-a-kind brain imaging platform – the first of its kind in Canada.
This major support will help build a new research tool called the BIC Advanced Multi-modal neuroimaging Platform for Psychiatry (or BIC-AMPP) at The Royal’s Brain Imaging Centre. The platform will bring together specialized equipment, expert staff, and pioneering research to enable simultaneous MRI, PET, and EEG imaging. Using these three powerful techniques at the same time will give researchers a complete picture of the brain’s structure, function, chemistry, and electrical activity, and how these are disrupted in mental illness and addiction.
“This grant puts Canada at the forefront of brain research for mental health,” says Dr. Florence Dzierszinski, president and CEO of the University of Ottawa Institute of Mental Health Research and vice-president of research at The Royal. “The extremely rich datasets generated through the BIC-AMPP are ideally suited for integration with AI tools, helping to transform our understanding of mental illness and improve care in the future.”
Recipients of the grant include a cross-disciplinary team of brain imaging experts led by Georg Northoff, and including Katie Dinelle, Florence Dzierszinski, Stuart Fogel, Natalia Jaworska, Tram Nguyen, Jennifer Phillips, Gayatri Saraf, Reggie Taylor, and Lauri Tuominen.
The Royal’s Brain Imaging Centre is a regional hub and leader in multi-modal brain imaging. Now, with the BIC-AMPP, it will become the first in Canada, and one of only three teams worldwide, with the advanced technology and expert staff needed to scan the brain in three different ways at the same time.
“This is an exciting step forward for brain imaging research in Canada,” says Katie Dinelle, administrative director of The Royal’s Clinical Brain Research Centre. “This platform offers an extraordinary opportunity to build capacity and advance training in this challenging field, and unlock discoveries about our most complex organ.”
This project is funded through the Platform Support Grant program, led by Brain Canada, supported by the Government of Canada and a handful of generous donors to The Royal.
The goal of the program is to strengthen the research infrastructure behind some of the country’s most promising mental health and neuroscience work.
