Resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rfMRI) studies have revealed organized patterns of brain activity, reflecting local and global synchronized activity within and across distinct functional brain regions. As fMRI measurement reflects c...

Since the advent of resting state functional connectivity mapping (FCM) within the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) field, many studies have reported finding functionally connected networks, or temporally correlated brain regions. Many group...

Dopamine D1 receptor (D1R) is an important therapeutic target associating with schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and attracting attention. Pharmacological-fMRI (phfMRI) is useful to investigate the neurophysiol...

Adenosine A2a receptor antagonists reduce symptom severity in Parkinson disease (PD) and animal models. Rodent studies support the hypothesis that A2a antagonists produce this benefit by reducing the inhibitory output of the basal ganglia indirect pathway. One way to test this hypothesis in humans is to quantify regional pharmacodynamic responses with cerebral blood flow (CBF) imaging. That approach has also been proposed as a tool to accelerate pharmaceutical dose finding, but has not yet been applied in humans to drugs in development. We successfully addressed both these aims with a perfusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study of the novel adenosine A2a antagonist SYN115. During a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover study in 21 PD patients on levodopa but no agonists, we acquired pulsed arterial spin labeling MRI at the end of each treatment period. SYN115 produced a highly significant decrease in thalamic CBF, consistent with reduced pallidothalamic inhibition via the indirect pa...

The recently-advanced multiband echo planar imaging (MB-EPI) technique has become increasingly used in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies. In this study to examine whether MB-EPI can detect brain activation as satisfactorily as standar...

Motivation deficits are a prominent negative symptom of schizophrenia, and it is therefore of clinical relevance to determine the genetic influences underlying motivation-related neural activity. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have...

Advances in neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have resulted in a greatly improved understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying human sensory, motor, and cognitive capabilities, leading to increasingly soph...

Representational similarity analysis (RSA) characterizes the relationship between the complex patterns of activity recorded using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to infer how the brain encodes different classes of information. While the fi...

Learning the temporal relationship between a warning cue (conditioned stimulus; CS) and aversive threat (unconditioned stimulus; UCS) is an important aspect of Pavlovian conditioning. Prior functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research has ident...

Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) enables in vivo tracking of axonal fibers in the brain and will be pivotal in studying brain connectivity in the pathological and healthy human brain. The accuracy of DTI, however, has not been exhaustively validated against actual anatomical data. In the present study DTI was used for studying cortico-thalamic projections in the porcine brain. DTI tracings were evaluated against two gold-standards: manganese (Mn2+) -enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and histochemical visualization of a histological tracer. At baseline, high resolution 3D T1-weighted MPRAGE scans of the brain were obtained in five young Göttingen minipigs on a 3T Siemens Trio scanner. Next, Mn2+ was stereotaxically injected into the prefrontal cortices (PFC) and uptake and transportation of Mn2+ were visualized using MRI on day two and four after injection. Mn2+ injection and projection sites were compared to the histological tracing. Finally, high-resolution DTI images from perfusion fixed brains wer...