Laboratory for Intelligent Neuroimaging and Brain Connectivity (LINBC) @ CHOP and Penn
Our lab (PI: Hao Huang), is dedicated to developing and applying the cutting-edge intelligent preclinical and clinical MR neuroimaging and analysis techniques to delineate human brain development and identify clinical biomarkers.
The LINBC laboratory is currently located at Department of Radiology, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania.
Research Summary
Research in the LINBC lab focuses on the structural and functional connectivity as well as micro-structural quantifications and brain atlases using the latest noninvasive neuroimaging techniques. The research goal is to address the neuroscientific questions and identify diagnostic or therapeutic neuroimaging biomarkers. The neuroscientific questions include how the human brain functional networks emerge and what the structural and metabolic underpinnings of the brain networks are during development. The neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders include autism and Alzheimer’s. Brain atlases are made with tractography of the white matter tracts. Micro-structural quantification of neural structures uses the approaches of measuring diffusion properties of water molecules inside the brain at the level of micrometers. These studies are made possible with recent advancement of cutting-edge neuroimaging acquisition techniques and big-data analytics of brain images.
Dr. Huang is probably known best for initializing comprehensive brain mapping studies of developmental human brains during middle and late fetal stage, a critical development phase for CNS, using advanced diffusion MRI. The significance of this work is that it provides unprecedented neuroscientific knowledge on connectivity, anatomy and microstructure of early developing brains. The three research areas in the LINBC lab is extended from this early work to delineate connectivity, create quantitative normal developmental brain charts and identify early biomarkers in brains with psychiatric disorders. Huang lab is continuously supported by NIH funding. Dr. Huang is on the Editorial Board of Neuroimage, at top neuroimaging journal. He is the committee member of NIH-sponsored BrainSpan Consortium (www.brainspan.org). He has been the Ad Hoc member of various NIH Study Sections for multiple times. He is the faculty director of Small Animal Imaging Facility (SAIF) at CHOP.