Diffusion MRI of the neonatal brain allows investigation of the organisational structure of maturing fibres during brain development. Post-mortem imaging has the potential to achieve high resolution by using long scan times, enabling precise assessment of small structures. The Forget-Me-Not study, part of the Developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP), aims to acquire and publicly distribute high-resolution diffusion MRI data for unfixed post-mortem neonatal brain at 7T with a custom-built head coil. This paper describes how the study addressed logistical, technical and ethical challenges relating to recruitment pipeline, care pathway, tissue preservation, scan setup and protocol optimisation. Results from the first subject recruited to the study demonstrate high-quality diffusion MRI data. Preliminary voxel-wise and tractography-based analyses are presented for the cortical plate, subplate and white matter pathways, with comparison to age-matched in vivo dHCP data. These results demonstrate that high quality post-mortem data can be acquired and provide a sensitive means to explore the developing human brain, as well as altered diffusion properties consistent with post-mortem changes, at high resolution.

Research on how humans perceive sensory inputs from their bodies ('interoception') has been rapidly gaining momentum, with interest across a host of disciplines from physiology through to psychiatry. However, studying interoceptive processes is not without significant challenges, and many methods utilised to access internal states have been largely devoted to capturing and relating naturally-occurring variations in interoceptive signals (such as heartbeats) to measures of how the brain processes these signals. An alternative procedure involves the controlled perturbation of specific interoceptive axes. This is challenging because it requires non-invasive interventions that can be repeated many times within a subject and that are potent but safe.Here we present an effective methodology for instigating these perturbations within the breathing domain. We describe a custom-built circuitry that is capable of delivering inspiratory resistive loads automatically and precisely. Importantly, our approach is compatible with magnetic resonance imaging environments, allowing for the administration of complicated experimental designs in neuroimaging as increasingly required within developing fields such as computational psychiatry/psychosomatics. We describe the experimental setup for both the control and monitoring of the inspiratory resistive loads, and demonstrate its possible utilities within different study designs. This methodology represents an important step forward from the previously utilised, manually-controlled resistive loading setups, which present significant experimental burdens with prolonged and/or complicated sequences of breathing stimuli.