NHP Interest

A. Why the interest in NHP neuroimaging?

The NHP neuroimaging research field and community have expanded rapidly in recent years. There is an immense value in studying the brain structure and function of non-human primate (NHP) brains since NHPs share similar behaviors and underlying neurobiological mechanisms. Comparative studies of human versus non-human primate brains provide important insights about how human-specific functions (e.g. speech and language) evolved through primate evolution and serve to bridge neuroscientific findings between human and non-human primate studies. The study of NHP brain anatomy and function has traditionally been dominated by invasive neurophysiological and post-mortem histological studies. Adding a new dimension to this research, NHP neuroimaging (via MRI) provides a means of studying brain structure , connectivity and function in-vivo and potentially longitudinally. It also bridges an important translational gap between invasive animal studies that directly record neuronal signals and non-invasive human neuroimaging that has to rely on a derived neural signal (e.g., BOLD).

A recent article (Neff 2020, Lab Animal) beautifully sums up the current state of NHP neuroimaging research.