Dr. Cary Savage, who is the Director of the Brain and Behavior Institute at the University of Nebraska. He shared with us about the Center for the Brain, Biology and Behavior which is located on the East side of Memorial Stadium. This Center takes up about 30,000 square feet of the space. The University has furnished the equipment needed. They do MRI’s on the football athletes who have a concussion. When Scott Frost came to UNL, he wanted to have MRI scanned of every football player before the start of the season, which was done. Football players go through a MRI scan after a concussion and they cannot return to playing until 30 hours after the concussion. This Institute has partnered with Auburn University.
The Multidisciplinary Research Center employs 18 faculty members. These people are from the Computer Science, Engineering, Political Science, Psychology, Special Education and Communication areas. This includes three colleges which are Arts & Science, Education and Engineering. With these colleges brings in 35 faculty members to facilitate the work being done and is still growing. This Center is partnered with the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
MRI Facility:
This facility can do scans of the brain and the whole body. The MRI machine is able to scan for structural, fractural, diffusion imaging, and spectroscopy. Dr. Savage said that the diffusion imaging helps them see the connections within the brain. This MRI machine can do a 3-D of the brain to show the area that has been effected by a concussion. They use a Siemens Skyra 3 Tesla MRI Scanner. They have a technologist that is well trained to use this machine, once a scan has been done, it is sent to the UNMC to be read and it does not take long for the results. They will eventually need to replace this large MRI scanner. They can use this scanner to see what happening the brain, can look at the eyes to see what is going on with them, and even see how the skin color changes when a person is under stress, or any other thing that might affect the skin color.
Salivary Bioscience Lab:
They can do salivary testing in this lab for many things. They can check for changes within the brain because of strokes, and memory. They have many different mythological tools available that they can use also for checking on people with strokes and memory loss.
In these labs many things are shared by many people. These include computers labs, scanners, office space, behavioral testing, and conference rooms, as the CB3 checks out behavioral problems.
Questions that an MRI can answer even about the obesity “epidemic.” The brain can react differently when someone eats healthy, or when they don’t watch what they eat to lose weight. Dr. Savage shared with us about what happens with obesity in the United States. If one thing we learned the brain can change as individuals change their eating habits.