Brain-Wide Understanding, Intervention, and Wide-Readout to Promote Brain Health and Integrity and Prevent Brain Disorders

Dear Colleagues,

The brain is the commander of the nervous system and enables humans in complex sensory-motor functioning at the delicate interface of mind, behavior, and emotions. Health and longevity appear to be strongly connected in the preservation of brain health. Toward that end, it is vital to understand brain-wide health through brain-wide readout, and potential brain-wide intervention. While addressing brain health is challenging, it offers great opportunities to understand brain function and to identify optimal ways to preserve or promote brain health. Advances in the field promise novel pathways in the prevention of brain disorders and maintenance of brain integrity, function, and health. For example, brain-wide readout concepts and tools are emerging, shedding light on brain health and disease. However, due to the complexity of the brain, a complex metric to understand multidimensional aspects and quantification of brain health is still lacking.

Structural and functional imaging techniques have made it possible to evaluate network integrity and function in the healthy and pathologic brain. Many structured or semi-structured questionnaires have also been developed for self- or specialist-assessments of brain abilities at the intersection of mind, emotion, and behavior. These objective and subjective measures offer strengths and weaknesses. Several factors appear to further complicate the measurement of brain health, e.g., age, environmental, racial, and cultural variations. The consideration of patient-centered assessment of brain function, including cognitive function, will add value in measuring brain health. Accordingly, advanced techniques and tools are required to possess capable metrics for brain health that are not only sensitive but also inclusive and multidimensional. Such multidisciplinary techniques will allow comprehensive measurement and monitoring of the brain under various conditions.

While our understanding of brain function rapidly advances, we still need to come closer to capturing the patterns of brain activity across the neuronal networks at the interface of cognitive and mental behavior and function. Increasingly, artificial intelligence is used as a vital tool to understand the brain; recent development in brain-inspired computation, brain simulation, and intelligent machines are collectively advancing our understanding of the most mysterious organ in the human body. In addition, to develop precision biomarkers for overall brain health, imaging-based techniques need to expand and cover cognitive neuroscience to unfold brain mechanisms underlying brain cognitive function and dysfunction. A paradigm shift is also noted in the identification of treatment targets by focusing on balancing brain functions instead of survival and life expectancy. Precise preservation of brain health cannot be achieved without collaboration and coordinated multidimensional and interrelated research. In turn, a collective effort in understanding and promoting brain health will greatly influence science, medicine, and our aging society. Toward these ends, contributions are warmly welcomed for this special issue with original research papers and reviews in brain-wide understanding, intervention, and wide-readout to promote brain health and integrity and to prevent brain disorders.

Interested authors can submit research and review papers where they can address one or more of these:
• Mechanisms of brain function and dysfunction in health and disease 
• Metrics or tools to comprehensively assess or quantify brain health, and function (brain-wide readout)
• Prevent and treat brain dysfunction in some major neurological and psychiatric disorders for example by application of brain-wide intervention
• Neuroscience of cognitive and behavioral responses, including novel measurable behaviors
• Translational, basic, and clinical research to guide diagnosis and treatment
• Structural and functional data sets, simulations, and modeling
• Medical hypotheses, including theoretical and computational neuroscience

Dr. Parisa Gazerani

Guest Editor

Manuscripts should be submitted via our online editorial system at https://imr.propub.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to start your submission. Manuscripts can be submitted now or up until the deadline. All papers will go through peer-review process. Accepted papers will be published in the journal (as soon as accepted) and meanwhile listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, reviews as well as short communications are preferred. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office to announce on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts will be thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. Please visit the Instruction for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) in this open access journal is 2200 USD. Submitted manuscripts should be well formatted in good English.