The human body is made up of numerous cells which work together to carry out certain functions and produce certain results. Blood, which is also known as the fluid of life, supplies tissues with oxygen. This forms the basis of the blood level oxygen-dependent functional MRI (BOLD fMRI). It’s a type of imaging that records the functional activities in arteries and tissues based on oxygenation and deoxygenation of blood. Arteries and nerves are involved in an activity called neurovascular coupling. This refers to the control mechanism that connects fleeting brain activity to a resulting shift in cerebral blood flow. Recently, scientists did a study to find out the relationship between BOLD fMRI and neuroelectric activity in the brain.
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The steps used to obtain the correlations from preprocessed fMRI and EEG time courses. Credit: bioRxiv
What exactly is this connection
Table of Contents
A popular technique for noninvasively mapping brain function in both humans and animals is blood oxygenation level-dependent functional MRI (BOLD fMRI). It is frequently considered that changes in excitatory neuronal activity are reflected in the BOLD fMRI response in the cortex. The blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal, seen in fMRI, represents variations in deoxyhemoglobin caused by localized changes in brain blood flow and blood oxygenation, which are connected to underlying neuronal activity via a mechanism known as neurovascular coupling.
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During the study, human subjects who were healthy and conscious were used; none had a history of neurological disorders. From each patient, MRI and EEG data were simultaneously collected, and data were extracted and preprocessed. The correlation between the fMRI BOLD and the EEG was analyzed. The occipital electrodes and frontoparietal fMRI network showed the most positive connection with the EEG alpha power. Positive correlations were discovered between the fMRI BOLD and the EEG results.
Clinical significance
The knowledge of the relationship between neural and hemodynamics is very important clinically. Understanding the physiological and metabolic underpinnings of the brain’s regulation of the flow of blood is useful. It contributes to our growing understanding of the cellular and vascular mechanisms underlying neurovascular connection in both health and illness. Other imaging methods may be unable to find abnormalities in the brain that fMRI can.
It is useful in the diagnosis of cerebrovascular diseases, examination of the brain’s architecture, and even administration of certain treatments. BOLD fMRI is essential to contemporary psychiatric studies, it gives room for the assessment of brain structure and function and possible risk factors for certain neuropsychiatric conditions.
Conclusion
The human brain is a very intriguing and vital part of the body. The discovery of various neuroimaging techniques has brought about methods in which the brain can be probed in non-invasive ways. Together, these techniques can highlight the anomalies in brain physiology and structure that underlie various brain-related illnesses.
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References
Linking neuronal and hemodynamic network signatures in the resting human brain | bioRxiv
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