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Special Issue "Perfusion and Functional MRI in Basic and Clinical Neuroscience"

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Guest Editor

Department of Computer Science, State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton, NY 13902, USA
Interests: neuroimaging; blood flow imaging; functional connectivity; computer vision; pattern recognition; deep learning

Dr. Li Zhao
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Guest Editor

College of Biomedical Engineering & Instrument Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China
Interests: MRI; arterial spin labeling; machine learning; resting state; BOLD

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been established as a superior anatomical imaging method. In addition to regular anatomical MRI (such as T1 and T2 weighted contrast), functional contrast mechanisms such as perfusion-weighted imaging (PWI) and blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) functional MRI (fMRI) have experienced a technical revolution over the last decade, advanced our understanding to normal brain mapping, and demonstrated their potentials in many clinical conditions, including stroke, presurgical planning, and psychiatric disorders, to name a few. We aim to explore the role of PWI and BOLD fMRI in enhancing our understanding in neuroscience of typical and atypical brains. PWI includes dynamic susceptibility contrast (DSC) MRI and arterial spin labeling (ASL) MRI. ASL MRI is not limited to perfusion measurement at rest, but can be extended to other related measurements, including arterial transit time, perfusion in response to task activation and functional connectivity at rest, and task-induced functional connectivity.

This Special Issue will consider review and original research articles focused on the use of perfusion and functional MRI to advance our understanding of imaging techniques, data analysis methods, brain function, organization, brain function–behavior relationship, brain function–other imaging modality (such as EEG and MEG) relationship in health and disease, and intervention (including behavioral and biomedical processes).

Dr. Weiying Dai
Dr. Li Zhao
Guest Editors

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Keywords

MRI
fMRI
arterial spin labeling
dynamic susceptibility contrast
functional connectivity

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19 pages, 7468 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Effect of Meditation on Brain Activity during an Attention Task: A Comparison Study of ASL and BOLD Task fMRI

and

Brain Sci. 2023, 13(12), 1653; https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci13121653 - 29 Nov 2023

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Abstract

Focused attention meditation (FAM) training has been shown to improve attention, but the neural basis of FAM on attention has not been thoroughly understood. Here, we aim to investigate the neural effect of a 2-month FAM training on novice meditators in a visual oddball task (a frequently adopted task to evaluate attention), evaluated with both ASL and BOLD fMRI. Using ASL, activation was increased in the middle cingulate (part of the salience network, SN) and temporoparietal (part of the frontoparietal network, FPN) regions; the FAM practice time was negatively associated with the longitudinal changes in activation in the medial prefrontal (part of the default mode network, DMN) and middle frontal (part of the FPN) regions. Using BOLD, the FAM practice time was positively associated with the longitudinal changes of activation in the inferior parietal (part of the dorsal attention network, DAN), dorsolateral prefrontal (part of the FPN), and precentral (part of the DAN) regions. The effect sizes for the activation changes and their association with practice time using ASL are significantly larger than those using BOLD. Our study suggests that FAM training may improve attention via modulation of the DMN, DAN, SN, and FPN, and ASL may be a sensitive tool to study the FAM effect on attention. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Perfusion and Functional MRI in Basic and Clinical Neuroscience)

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14 pages, 2536 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Decreased Functional Connectivity of the Core Pain Matrix in Herpes Zoster and Postherpetic Neuralgia Patients

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Brain Sci. 2023, 13(10), 1357; https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci13101357 - 22 Sep 2023

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Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the resting-state functional connectivity (FC) changes among the pain matrix and other brain regions in herpes zoster (HZ) and postherpetic neuralgia (PHN) patients. Fifty-four PHN patients, 52 HZ patients, and 54 healthy controls (HCs) underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) scans. We used a seed-based FC approach to investigate whether HZ and PHN patients exhibited abnormal FC between the pain matrix and other brain regions compared to HCs. A random forest (RF) model was constructed to explore the feasibility of potential neuroimaging indicators to distinguish the two groups of patients. We found that PHN patients exhibited decreased FCs between the pain matrix and the putamen, superior temporal gyrus, middle frontal gyrus, middle cingulate gyrus, amygdala, precuneus, and supplementary motor area compared with HCs. Similar results were observed in HZ patients. The disease durations of PHN patients were negatively correlated with those aforementioned impaired FCs. The results of machine learning experiments showed that the RF model combined with FC features achieved a classification accuracy of 75%. Disrupted FC among the pain matrix and other regions in HZ and PHN patients may affect multiple dimensions of pain processing. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Perfusion and Functional MRI in Basic and Clinical Neuroscience)

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Special Issue "Perfusion and Functional MRI in Basic and Clinical Neuroscience"

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