“This work demonstrates the potential of fMRI for mapping healthy neural networks as well as those that may contribute to neurological diseases such as dementia and other mental health disorders, which are significant national and global health problems,” said Guoying Liu from the US National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB).
The fMRI works by detecting local increases in oxygen as blood is delivered to a working part of the brain. The technique has been instrumental for identifying which areas in the brain control functions such as vision, hearing, or touch.
However, standard fMRI can only detect the blood flow coming to replenish an area of the brain several seconds after it has performed a function.
It was generally accepted that this was the limit of what could be detected by fMRI – identification of a region in the brain that had responded to a large stimulus, such as a continuous 30 second “blast” of bright light.
