About

The Preclinical Neuroimaging lab develops and applies neuroimaging technologies adapted for preclinical research in rodent models of neurological and psychiatric disorders. We are hosted at the Radiology and Nuclear Medicine department and Cognitive Neuroscience department of the Radboud University Medical Center.

We are part of the Donders Institute for brain cognition and behaviour and operate laboratories at the Preclinical Imaging Center

Our vision

We aim to investigate animal models of neurological and psychiatric disorders to bring forward disease mechanisms and to test novel therapeutics with a focus on translational neuroimaging technologies.

We are interested in carrying out science that is robust and reproducible setting. Our dataset are made available on the openneuro.org platform upon publication. Previous work is also available on the xnat platform. We have carried out the first mouse fMRI mutli-center study, and continue to provide material, code, and expertise to laboratories interested in rodent MR imaging.

We want to foster an inclusive and dynamic team where learning and personal developments are the priority.

We welcome students from all neuroscience backgrounds and levels to apply See the project page for on-going projects and current areas of interests of the lab.

Figure | 3D represention of a mouse neuronal network.

Our methods

We focus on functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging as the main tool to investigate neuronal-vascular activity and to establish functional connectivity across the whole-brain in healthy and rodent models of brain disorders. Statistical imaging and database mining are used to complement our neuronal network models. We implement genetically-encoded neuromodulatory tools, optogenetics and chemogenetics, to causally manipulate key hub regions of the brain, concurrently with whole-brain functional imaging to elucidate the fundamental role played by vulnerable elements of a neuronal network. See the resources page for more information on our methods.