Title

Mapping resting-state brain networks in conscious animals

UMMS Affiliation

Department of Psychiatry

Publication Date

2010-04-13

Document Type

Article

Subjects

Animals; Brain; Brain Mapping; Cerebral Cortex; Cerebrovascular Circulation; Consciousness; Feasibility Studies; Imaging, Three-Dimensional; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Male; Neural Pathways; Oxygen; Prefrontal Cortex; Rats; Rats, Long-Evans; Reproducibility of Results; Rest; Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; Thalamus; Wakefulness

Disciplines

Psychiatry

Abstract

In the present study we mapped brain functional connectivity in the conscious rat at the "resting state" based on intrinsic blood-oxygenation-level dependent (BOLD) fluctuations. The conscious condition eliminated potential confounding effects of anesthetic agents on the connectivity between brain regions. Indeed, using correlational analysis we identified multiple cortical and subcortical regions that demonstrated temporally synchronous variation with anatomically well-defined regions that are crucial to cognitive and emotional information processing including the prefrontal cortex (PFC), thalamus and retrosplenial cortex. The functional connectivity maps created were stringently validated by controlling for false positive detection of correlation, the physiologic basis of the signal source, as well as quantitatively evaluating the reproducibility of maps. Taken together, the present study has demonstrated the feasibility of assessing functional connectivity in conscious animals using fMRI and thus provided a convenient and non-invasive tool to systematically investigate the connectional architecture of selected brain networks in multiple animal models.

DOI of Published Version

10.1016/j.jneumeth.2010.04.001

Source

J Neurosci Methods. 2010 Jun 15;189(2):186-96. Epub 2010 Apr 9. Link to article on publisher's site

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Journal of neuroscience methods

Related Resources

Link to Article in PubMed

PubMed ID

20382183

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