Michaela Cordova, a research associate and lab manager at Oregon Health and Science University, begins by “de-metaling”: removing rings, watches, gadgets and other sources of metal, double-checking her pockets for overlooked objects that could, in her words, “fly in.” Then she enters the scanning room, raises and lowers the bed, and waves a head coil in the general direction of the viewing window and the iPad camera that’s enabling this virtual lab tour (I’m watching from thousands of miles away in Massachusetts). Her voice is mildly distorted by the microphone embedded in the MRI scanner, which from my slightly blurry vantage point looks less like an industrial cannoli than a beast with a glowing blue mouth. I can’t help but think that eerie description might resonate with her usual clientele.

Cordova works with children, assuaging their fears, easing them in and out of the scanner while coaxing them with soft words, Pixar movies and promises of snacks to minimize wiggling. These kids are enrolled in research aimed at mapping the brain’s neural connections.

The physical links between brain regions, collectively known as the “connectome,” are part of what distinguish humans cognitively from other species. But they also differentiate us from one another. Scientists are now combining neuroimaging approaches with machine learning to understand the commonalities and differences in brain structure and function across individuals, with the goal of predicting how a given brain will change over time because of genetic and environmental influences.

The lab where Cordova works, headed by associate professor Damien Fair, is concerned with the functional connectome, the map of brain regions that coordinate to carry out specific tasks and to influence behavior. Fair has a special name for a person’s distinct neural connections: the functional fingerprint. Like the fingerprints on the tips of our digits, a functional fingerprint is specific to each of us and can serve as a unique identifier.

“I could take a fingerprint from my five-year-old, and I’d still be able to know that fingerprint is hers when she’s 25,” Fair said. Even though her finger might get bigger and go through other changes with age and experience, “still the core features are all there.” In the same way, work from Fair’s lab and others hints that the essence of someone’s functional connectome might be identifiably fixed and that normal changes over a lifetime are largely predictable.

Identifying, tracking and modeling the functional connectome could expose how brain signatures lead to variations in behavior and, in some cases, confer a higher risk of developing certain neuropsychiatric conditions. To this end, Fair and his team systematically search their data for patterns in brain connectivity across scans, studies and, ultimately, clinical populations.

Characterizing the Connectome

Traditional techniques for mapping the functional connectome focus on just two brain regions at a time, using MRI data to correlate how the activity of each changes in relation to the other. Brain regions with signals that vary in unison are assigned a score of 1. If one increases while the other decreases, that merits a –1. If there is no observable relationship between the two, that’s a 0.