The intrinsic-signal optical imaging is widely used in experimental, theoretical and applied research of the mammal’s brain neocortex functional anatomy. However, a neural activity signal is hidden by the background activity, the amplitude of which is an order of magnitude larger than the mapping signal amplitude. Most of such background activity represents spontaneous oscillations in 0.01–0.15 Hz frequency range related to vasomotor oscillations. In this paper, we point out that such oscillations change their power and phase during the response time course. The most dramatic influence is intrinsic for 0.05–0.15 Hz oscillations. The power of vasomotor oscillations declines more quickly than the stability features of their phase characteristics. Departing from these data, we suggested approaches for minimization of role of vasomotor oscillations in functional maps resulting from intrinsic-signal optical imaging.
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