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Current Research in Acupuncture pp 89–108Cite as

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Basic Acupuncture Research

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Abstract

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been used to study the underlying mechanisms of acupuncture for more than a decade. Until the present day, over 80 studies and a dozen review articles have been published on this topic. Emphasizing the methodological and statistical quality of the studies, this critical review evaluates the results obtained so far. After dividing the studies by their analysis strategies into hypothesis-driven and data-driven approaches, inclusion criteria were defined for a meta-analysis on the cortical activations reported by the hypothesis-driven studies. Due to the inhomogeneity of the methods the results from the data-driven studies were only evaluated qualitatively. Seventy-one out of 82 studies applied hypothesis-driven methods. However, only 14 of them met the inclusion criteria. The majority of these studies reported activations in cortical areas relevant to the processing of somatosensory, motor or pain signals, as well as areas related to the special senses. In contrast, data-driven approaches identified some cortical networks that were influenced strongly by acupuncture sometimes leading to sustained changes in cortical connectivity. So far it is impossible to say if cortical activations under acupuncture are part of an underlying mechanism or if they simply reflect the brain’s processing of the acupuncture stimulus. Recent results from data-driven analyses, however, have started to shed light on the role that the brain may play in mediating acupuncture-related effects.

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Notes

  1. 1.

     Also often called “model-free approaches”.

  2. 2.

     That is, the pre-chosen number of independent components.

  3. 3.

     June 2010.

  4. 4.

     When analysing fMRI data with the GLM approach, there are two basic statistical models: A fixed-effects model or a random-effects model. While a random-effects analysis (RFX) takes into account the between-subject variance of the neuronal activations found on the single subject level, in a fixed-effects analysis (FFX), only within-subject variance is considered. As a consequence FFX has a considerably higher susceptibility to outliers, i.e. single subjects with strong activations (Friston et al. 1999). Thus, for group analyses RFX is the method of choice, as the results from an FFX cannot be generalized from the sample to the population.

  5. 5.

     In fact some researchers clearly distinguish between deqi and “sharp pain” (Hui et al. 2007; Kong et al. 2007a, b).

  6. 6.

     Also called resting-state networks, because they are as well present, when the brain is “at rest.”

  7. 7.

    Due to so-called susceptibility artifacts.

  8. 8.

    Due to pulsation-induced motion artifacts.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Horst Görtz Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pain and Autonomics–Integrative Research (PAIR), Clinic of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Clinic Jena, Philosophenweg 3, 07743, Jena, Germany

    Florian Beissner

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  1. Florian Beissner
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Correspondence to Florian Beissner .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Department of Neurosurgery, The University of Texas Medical School a, 6431 Fannin Street, Houston, 77030, Texas, USA

    Ying Xia

  2. , Shanghai Research Center for Acupuncture, Fudan University, Guoshoujing Road 199, Shanghai, 201203, China, People's Republic

    Guanghong Ding

  3. Shanghai Medical School, Inst. Acupuncture Research, Fudan University, Yi Xue Yuan Road 138, Shanghai, 200032, China, People's Republic

    Gen-Cheng Wu

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Beissner, F. (2013). Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Basic Acupuncture Research. In: Xia, Y., Ding, G., Wu, GC. (eds) Current Research in Acupuncture. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3357-6_4

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