Neuroimaging and psychiatry

Professor Wayne Drevets discusses the impact of neuroimaging on psychiatry - allowing clinicians to look at brain function or brain chemistry in patients.

Researchers use neuroimaging in part because it gives you a non-invasive way to look at humans or non-human primates or other types of animals in a way that doesn’t hurt the individual. You can look at the living brain in a non-invasive way using brain imaging. In psychiatry that has been indispensable, because we haven’t had a way to look at brain function or brain chemistry in individuals who suffered from psychiatric disorders. We also don’t have animal models that really faithfully represent all of the different changes that occur in associating with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or other psychiatric illnesses. So brain imaging has become a primary tool to research the pathophysiology of psychiatric disorders within the context of studying illnesses where we didn’t previously have tools where we could look at structure and function in living patients who suffer from the illnesses we study.