Advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging of the human brainstem

The brainstem is of tremendous importance for our daily survival, and yet the functional relationships between various nuclei, their projection targets, and afferent regulatory areas remain poorly characterized. The main reason for this lies in the sub-optimal performance of standard neuroimaging methods in this area. In particular, fMRI signals are much harder to detect in the brainstem region compared to cortical areas. Here we describe and validate a new approach to measure activation of brainstem nuclei in humans using standard fMRI sequences and widely available tools for statistical image processing. By spatially restricting an independent component analysis to an anatomically defined brainstem mask, we excluded those areas from the analysis that were strongly affected by physiological noise. This allowed us to identify for the first time intrinsic connectivity networks in the human brainstem and to map brainstem-cortical connectivity purely based on functionally defined regions of interest.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  NeuroImage

• Publication date

  2014-02-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Computer Science, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.07.081PMID 23933038
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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