York has already established itself as one of the country's leading centres for bioscience research and business development and nowhere are the applications more important than when directed towards the improvement of human health.

It is especially exciting, therefore, when a facility that holds out prospects for a better understanding of how our brains work emerges in our midst.

We hardly need to be reminded that the functioning of the human brain is still poorly understood when compared with many other organs of the body.

This is mainly because it is so difficult to access and study, not least without major interference. This situation is changing rapidly with the development of powerful new tools that allow the brain to be observed - "scanned" - while working normally or subject to pathological or experimental change. It was the availability of such new tools that prompted the University's Department of Psychology (one of the country's two leading psychology departments) to take the initiative to create the £5.2 million York Neuroimaging Centre (YNiC) which is being developed in a unique way, combining research and clinical applications within a commercial operational environment.

The Neuroimaging Centre, recently developed on York Science Park, is ground- breaking in many ways, partly in having two powerful, different, brain scanners, but not least in bringing together experts from many different disciplines.

We are generally familiar now with the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanners that are available in major hospitals and provide approaching a million scans to the National Health Service every year in the United Kingdom.

The £2.4 million unit in the Neuroimaging Centre is twice as powerful as most of these, so allowing faster and more detailed scans to be made.

While the MRI scanner provides images of brain structure, the centre's £1.1 million MEG (MagnetoEncephaloGraphic) scanner, which is the first of its type in Europe, provides real-time information about brain activity. Together, these two units place York among the leaders in the world researching in this field and the race is on to strengthen that position.

Talking to Professor Gary Green, director of YNiC, it is easy to share the excitement and enthusiasm of being right up at the forefront of scientific research in this important area of human activity and health. The two scanners are now being fine-tuned for optimal performance. There are already about 20 different projects under way, involving many different teams, and they are being used in clinical applications. Research programmes relate to perception, language, memory, emotion and motor tasks.

The YNiC team is working to devise new products that will provide different ways of observing brain structure and activity in a move towards the holy grail of achieving molecular imaging. This is why YNiC collaborates with psychologists, chemists, mathematicians, electronics engineers, health scientists, biologists and physicists as well as staff in the Hull-York Medical School.

An output of about 2.0 gigabytes of data per hour from the two scanners emphasises the need for some hefty processing requirements delivered through GRID computing.

In many situations it would have been simple to start such a project with research grants alone and hope for continuation.

But the commercial viability of YNiC has been considered right from the start and ongoing commercial contracts and support are likely to be crucial to maintaining the facility so that it can continue to hold its place, up with the world leaders, in neuroimaging research and applications.

Updated: 09:35 Wednesday, August 24, 2005