Title
Advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging of the human brainstem.
Abstract
The brainstem is of tremendous importance for our daily survival, and yet the functional relationships between various nuclei, their projection targets, and afferent regulatory areas remain poorly characterized. The main reason for this lies in the sub-optimal performance of standard neuroimaging methods in this area. In particular, fMRI signals are much harder to detect in the brainstem region compared to cortical areas. Here we describe and validate a new approach to measure activation of brainstem nuclei in humans using standard fMRI sequences and widely available tools for statistical image processing. By spatially restricting an independent component analysis to an anatomically defined brainstem mask, we excluded those areas from the analysis that were strongly affected by physiological noise. This allowed us to identify for the first time intrinsic connectivity networks in the human brainstem and to map brainstem–cortical connectivity purely based on functionally defined regions of interest.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.07.081
NeuroImage
Keywords
Field
DocType
Brainstem,Functional magnetic resonance imaging,Brainstem nuclei,Resting state,Physiological noise correction,Independent component analysis,Intrinsic connectivity networks
Neuroscience,Functional magnetic resonance imaging,Afferent,Resting state fMRI,Image processing,Psychology,Independent component analysis,Neuroimaging,Communication noise,Brainstem
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
86
1053-8119
10
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.53
8
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Florian Beissner1443.83
Andy Schumann2173.35
Franziska Brunn3100.53
Daniela Eisenträger4100.53
Karl-Jürgen Bär5141.33