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Quantitative Evaluation of Activation State in Functional Brain Imaging

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Abstract

Neuronal activity can evoke the hemodynamic change that gives rise to the observed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signal. These increases are also regulated by the resting blood volume fraction (V 0) associated with regional vasculature. The activation locus detected by means of the change in the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal intensity thereby may deviate from the actual active site due to varied vascular density in the cortex. Furthermore, conventional detection techniques evaluate the statistical significance of the hemodynamic observations. In this sense, the significance level relies not only upon the intensity of the BOLD signal change, but also upon the spatially inhomogeneous fMRI noise distribution that complicates the expression of the results. In this paper, we propose a quantitative strategy for the calibration of activation states to address these challenging problems. The quantitative assessment is based on the estimated neuronal efficacy parameter \(\epsilon\) of the hemodynamic model in a voxel-by-voxel way. It is partly immune to the inhomogeneous fMRI noise by virtue of the strength of the optimization strategy. Moreover, it is easy to incorporate regional vascular information into the activation detection procedure. By combining MR angiography images, this approach can remove large vessel contamination in fMRI signals, and provide more accurate functional localization than classical statistical techniques for clinical applications. It is also helpful to investigate the nonlinear nature of the coupling between synaptic activity and the evoked BOLD response. The proposed method might be considered as a potentially useful complement to existing statistical approaches.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the editor and two anonymous referees for their insightful suggestions and valuable comments, which helped to improve the quality of our presented work. This work is supported in part by the National Basic Research Program of China under Grant 2010CB732500, in part by the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China under Grant 2012AA011603, in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 30800250.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Modern Optical Instrumentation, Department of Optical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China

    Zhenghui Hu, Pengyu Ni, Cong Liu & Huafeng Liu

  2. Department of Radiology, Tongji Hospital of Tongji University, Shanghai, 200065, China

    Xiaohu Zhao

  3. B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, 14623, USA

    Pengcheng Shi

  4. University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, NY, 14642, USA

    Pengcheng Shi

Authors
  1. Zhenghui Hu
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  2. Pengyu Ni
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  3. Cong Liu
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  4. Xiaohu Zhao
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  5. Huafeng Liu
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  6. Pengcheng Shi
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Correspondence to Zhenghui Hu.

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Hu, Z., Ni, P., Liu, C. et al. Quantitative Evaluation of Activation State in Functional Brain Imaging. Brain Topogr 25, 362–373 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10548-012-0230-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10548-012-0230-5

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