Decoding Brains: Imaging to Advance Mental Health

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) provides powerful tools for mapping the human brain. However, because conventional fMRI provides little information about brain function in individuals, it is rarely used for clinical applications. Given that mental disorders and neurodegenerative diseases disrupt normal thought processes, the lack of any principled method for assessing thought patterns directly presents a serious limitation to our ability to diagnose these disorders. Recent breakthroughs in individualized functional brain mapping could provide new opportunities to improve diagnosis, prognosis, and monitoring of brain disorders and neurodegenerative diseases.