Abstract
“Resting-state” fMRI has substantially contributed to the understanding of human and non-human functional brain organization by the analysis of correlated patterns in spontaneous activity within dedicated brain systems. Spontaneous neural activity is indirectly measured from the blood oxygenation level-dependent signal as acquired by echo planar imaging, when subjects quietly “resting” in the scanner. Animal models including disease or knockout models allow a broad spectrum of experimental manipulations not applicable in humans. The non-invasive fMRI approach provides a promising tool for cross-species comparative investigations. This review focuses on the principles of “resting-state” functional connectivity analysis and its applications to living animals. The translational aspect from in vivo animal models toward clinical applications in humans is emphasized. We introduce the fMRI-based investigation of the non-human brain’s hemodynamics, the methodological issues in the data postprocessing, and the functional data interpretation from different abstraction levels. The longer term goal of integrating fMRI connectivity data with structural connectomes obtained with tracing and optical imaging approaches is presented and will allow the interrogation of fMRI data in terms of directional flow of information and may identify the structural underpinnings of observed functional connectivity patterns.
Highlights
An unexpected observation in the noisy fMRI signal obtained from humans quietly “resting” in the absence of any specific task has led to the discovery of a phenomenon well known as “intrinsic” or “resting-state” functional connectivity [1, 2]
In vivo imaging becomes an increasingly important phenotyping instrument in order to accelerate our understanding of the architecture in both healthy and diseased brains [20]
The purpose of this review is to introduce the principles of rs-fMRI with specification to animal measurements and applications to the animal model
Summary
An unexpected observation in the noisy fMRI signal obtained from humans quietly “resting” in the absence of any specific task has led to the discovery of a phenomenon well known as “intrinsic” or “resting-state” functional connectivity [1, 2]. Patterns of functional activity are topologically organized [7,8,9] within defined brain systems even across species [10], rather than representing artifactual byproducts of non-neurophysiological process including motion, cardiac, or respiratory factors In vivo imaging becomes an increasingly important phenotyping instrument in order to accelerate our understanding of the architecture in both healthy and diseased brains [20]
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