RHODE ISLAND: Team wins NIH photo and video contest
The winners of the “Show Us Your BRAINs!” Photo and Video contest are chosen each year based on their eye-catching ability to capture the creative spirit of the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative.
The video took a true team effort. Nicole Provenza, a graduate student in the lab of David Borton, Brown University, Providence, RI, produced it with the project’s principal investigator Wayne Goodman, lead neurosurgeon Sameer Sheth, and research assistant Raissa Mathura, all at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston. Another vital contributor was Noam Peled, MGH/HST Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, MA. More
The video shows a 360-degree view of the brain of a person with severe OCD. At about 15 seconds into the video, the brain’s outer surface fades away to reveal the critical brain structures that serve as landmarks for targeting the disorder.
These include the anterior commissure (orange), helping to transfer information between the brain’s two hemispheres; caudate nucleus (dark blue), involved in various higher neurological functions, such as learning and memory; putamen (light blue), which plays a role in learning and motor control; and ventral striatum (yellow), part of the brain’s circuitry for decision-making and reward-related behavior.