scholarly journals Ultrasound functional neuroimaging reveals propagation of task-related brain activity in behaving primates

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandre Dizeux ◽  
Marc Gesnik ◽  
Harry Ahnine ◽  
Kevin Blaize ◽  
Fabrice Arcizet ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTIn recent decades, neuroimaging has played an invaluable role in improving the fundamental understanding of the brain. At the macro scale, neuroimaging modalities such as MRI, EEG, and MEG, exploit a wide field of view to explore the brain as a global network of interacting regions. However, this comes at the price of either limited spatiotemporal resolution or limited sensitivity. At the micro scale, electrophysiology is used to explore the dynamic aspects of neuronal activity with a very high temporal resolution. However, this modality requires a statistical averaging of several tens of single task responses. A large-scale neuroimaging modality of sufficient spatial and temporal resolution and sensitivity to study brain region activation dynamically would open new territories of possibility in neuroscienceWe show that neurofunctional ultrasound imaging (fUS) is both able to assess brain activation during single cognitive tasks within superficial and deeper areas of the frontal cortex areas, and image the directional propagation of information within and between these regions. Equipped with an fUS device, two macaque rhesus monkeys were instructed before a stimulus appeared to rest (fixation) or to look towards (saccade) or away (antisaccade) from a stimulus. Our results identified an abrupt transient change in activity for all acquisitions in the supplementary eye field (SEF) when the animals were required to change a rule regarding the task cued by a stimulus. Simultaneous imaging in the anterior cingulate cortex and SEF revealed a time delay in the directional functional connectivity of 0.27 ± 0.07 s and 0.9 ± 0.2 s for animals S and Y, respectively. These results provide initial evidence that recording cerebral hemodynamics over large brain areas at a high spatiotemporal resolution and sensitivity with neurofunctional ultrasound can reveal instantaneous monitoring of endogenous brain signals and behavior.

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bin He ◽  
Abbas Sohrabpour ◽  
Emery Brown ◽  
Zhongming Liu

Brain activity and connectivity are distributed in the three-dimensional space and evolve in time. It is important to image brain dynamics with high spatial and temporal resolution. Electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) are noninvasive measurements associated with complex neural activations and interactions that encode brain functions. Electrophysiological source imaging estimates the underlying brain electrical sources from EEG and MEG measurements. It offers increasingly improved spatial resolution and intrinsically high temporal resolution for imaging large-scale brain activity and connectivity on a wide range of timescales. Integration of electrophysiological source imaging and functional magnetic resonance imaging could further enhance spatiotemporal resolution and specificity to an extent that is not attainable with either technique alone. We review methodological developments in electrophysiological source imaging over the past three decades and envision its future advancement into a powerful functional neuroimaging technology for basic and clinical neuroscience applications.


Author(s):  
Hugues Duffau

Investigating the neural and physiological basis of language is one of the most important challenges in neurosciences. Direct electrical stimulation (DES), usually performed in awake patients during surgery for cerebral lesions, is a reliable tool for detecting both cortical and subcortical (white matter and deep grey nuclei) regions crucial for cognitive functions, especially language. DES transiently interacts locally with a small cortical or axonal site, but also nonlocally, as the focal perturbation will disrupt the entire subnetwork sustaining a given function. Thus, in contrast to functional neuroimaging, DES represents a unique opportunity to identify with great accuracy and reproducibility, in vivo in humans, the structures that are actually indispensable to the function, by inducing a transient virtual lesion based on the inhibition of a subcircuit lasting a few seconds. Currently, this is the sole technique that is able to directly investigate the functional role of white matter tracts in humans. Thus, combining transient disturbances elicited by DES with the anatomical data provided by pre- and postoperative MRI enables to achieve reliable anatomo-functional correlations, supporting a network organization of the brain, and leading to the reappraisal of models of language representation. Finally, combining serial peri-operative functional neuroimaging and online intraoperative DES allows the study of mechanisms underlying neuroplasticity. This chapter critically reviews the basic principles of DES, its advantages and limitations, and what DES can reveal about the neural foundations of language, that is, the large-scale distribution of language areas in the brain, their connectivity, and their ability to reorganize.


2017 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. M. Beskin ◽  
S. V. Karpov ◽  
A. V. Biryukov ◽  
S. F. Bondar ◽  
E. A. Ivanov ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Howell ◽  
Mike Brady ◽  
Alexander Komarov

<p>As the Arctic’s sea ice extent continues to decline, remote sensing observations are becoming even more vital for the monitoring and understanding of this process.  Recently, the sea ice community has entered a new era of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites operating at C-band with the launch of Sentinel-1A in 2014, Sentinel-1B in 2016 and the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) in 2019. These missions represent a collection of 5 spaceborne SAR sensors that together can routinely cover Arctic sea ice with a high spatial resolution (20-90 m) but also with a high temporal resolution (1-7 days) typically associated with passive microwave sensors. Here, we used ~28,000 SAR image pairs from Sentinel-1AB together with ~15,000 SAR images pairs from RCM to generate high spatiotemporal large-scale sea ice motion products across the pan-Arctic domain for 2020. The combined Sentinel-1AB and RCM sea ice motion product provides almost complete 7-day coverage over the entire pan-Arctic domain that also includes the pole-hole. Compared to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) Polar Pathfinder and Ocean and Sea Ice-Satellite Application Facility (OSI-SAF) sea ice motion products, ice speed was found to be faster with the Senintel-1AB and RCM product which is attributed to the higher spatial resolution of SAR imagery. More sea ice motion vectors were detected from the Sentinel-1AB and RCM product in during the summer months and within the narrow channels and inlets compared to the NSIDC Polar Pathfinder and OSI-SAF sea ice motion products. Overall, our results demonstrate that sea ice geophysical variables across the pan-Arctic domain can now be retrieved from multi-sensor SAR images at both high spatial and temporal resolution.</p>


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosalind D. Butterfield ◽  
Jennifer S. Silk ◽  
Kyung Hwa Lee ◽  
Greg S. Siegle ◽  
Ronald E. Dahl ◽  
...  

Abstract Anxiety is the most prevalent psychological disorder among youth, and even following treatment, it confers risk for anxiety relapse and the development of depression. Anxiety disorders are associated with heightened response to negative affective stimuli in the brain networks that underlie emotion processing. One factor that can attenuate the symptoms of anxiety and depression in high-risk youth is parental warmth. The current study investigates whether parental warmth helps to protect against future anxiety and depressive symptoms in adolescents with histories of anxiety and whether neural functioning in the brain regions that are implicated in emotion processing and regulation can account for this link. Following treatment for anxiety disorder (Time 1), 30 adolescents (M age = 11.58, SD = 1.26) reported on maternal warmth, and 2 years later (Time 2) they participated in a functional neuroimaging task where they listened to prerecorded criticism and neutral statements from a parent. Higher maternal warmth predicted lower neural activation during criticism, compared with the response during neutral statements, in the left amygdala, bilateral insula, subgenual anterior cingulate (sgACC), right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex. Maternal warmth was associated with adolescents’ anxiety and depressive symptoms due to the indirect effects of sgACC activation, suggesting that parenting may attenuate risk for internalizing through its effects on brain function.


2010 ◽  
Vol 2010 ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergey Karpov ◽  
Grigory Beskin ◽  
Sergey Bondar ◽  
Adriano Guarnieri ◽  
Corrado Bartolini ◽  
...  

In order to detect and investigate short stochastic optical flares from a number of variable astrophysical objects (GRBs, SNe, flare stars, CVs, X-Ray binaries) of unknown localizations as well as near-earth objects (NEOs), both natural and artificial, it is necessary to perform the systematic monitoring of large regions of the sky with high temporal resolution. Here we discuss the criteria for a system that is able to perform such a task and describe two cameras we created for wide-field monitoring with high temporal resolution—FAVOR and TORTORA. Also, we describe basic principles of real-time data processing for the high frame rates needed to achieve subsecond temporal resolution on a typical hardware.


2013 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 465-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Karpov ◽  
G. Beskin ◽  
S. Bondar ◽  
A. Perkov ◽  
E. Ivanov ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Takuya Sawada ◽  
Osamu Terashima ◽  
Yasuhiko Sakai ◽  
Kouji Nagata ◽  
Mitsuhiro Shikida ◽  
...  

The objective of this study is to establish a technique for accurately measuring the wall shear stress in turbulent flows using a micro-fabricated hot-film sensor. Previously, we developed a hot-film sensor with a flexible polyimide-film substrate. This sensor can be attached to curved walls and be used in various situations. Furthermore, the sensor has a 20-μm-wide, heated thin metal film. However, the temporal resolution of this hot-film sensor is not very high owing to its substrate’s high heat capacity. Consequently, its performance is inadequate for measuring the wall shear stress “fluctuations” in turbulent flows. Therefore, we have developed another type of hot-film sensor in which the substrate is replaced with silicon, and a cavity has been introduced under the hot-film for reducing heat loss from the sensor and achieving high temporal resolution. Furthermore, for improving the sensor’s spatial resolution, the width of the hot-film is decreased to 10 μm. The structure of the hot-film’s pattern and the flow-detection mechanism are similar to those of the previous sensor. Experimental results show that new hot-film sensor works as expected and has better temporal resolution than the previous hot-film sensor. As future work, we will measure the wall shear stress for a turbulent wall-jet and discuss the relationship between a large-scale coherent vortex structure and wall shear stress based on data obtained using the new hot-film sensor.


2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Y. Malbéteau ◽  
O. Merlin ◽  
G. Balsamo ◽  
S. Er-Raki ◽  
S. Khabba ◽  
...  

Abstract High spatial and temporal resolution surface soil moisture is required for most hydrological and agricultural applications. The recently developed Disaggregation based on Physical and Theoretical Scale Change (DisPATCh) algorithm provides 1-km-resolution surface soil moisture by downscaling the 40-km Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS) soil moisture using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data. However, the temporal resolution of DisPATCh data is constrained by the temporal resolution of SMOS (a global coverage every 3 days) and further limited by gaps in MODIS images due to cloud cover. This paper proposes an approach to overcome these limitations based on the assimilation of the 1-km-resolution DisPATCh data into a simple dynamic soil model forced by (inaccurate) precipitation data. The performance of the approach was assessed using ground measurements of surface soil moisture in the Yanco area in Australia and the Tensift-Haouz region in Morocco during 2014. It was found that the analyzed daily 1-km-resolution surface soil moisture compared slightly better to in situ data for all sites than the original disaggregated soil moisture products. Over the entire year, assimilation increased the correlation coefficient between estimated soil moisture and ground measurements from 0.53 to 0.70, whereas the mean unbiased RMSE (ubRMSE) slightly decreased from 0.07 to 0.06 m3 m−3 compared to the open-loop force–restore model. The proposed assimilation scheme has significant potential for large-scale applications over semiarid areas, since the method is based on data available at the global scale together with a parsimonious land surface model.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Chen ◽  
Ryan G. Natan ◽  
Yuhan Yang ◽  
Shih-Wei Chou ◽  
Qinrong Zhang ◽  
...  

AbstractStudying neuronal activity at synapses requires high spatiotemporal resolution. For high spatial resolution in vivo imaging at depth, adaptive optics (AO) is required to correct sample-induced aberrations. To improve temporal resolution, Bessel focus has been combined with two-photon fluorescence microscopy (2PFM) for fast volumetric imaging at subcellular lateral resolution. To achieve both high-spatial and high-temporal resolution at depth, we develop an efficient AO method that corrects the distorted wavefront of Bessel focus at the objective focal plane and recovers diffraction-limited imaging performance. Applying AO Bessel focus scanning 2PFM to volumetric imaging of zebrafish larval and mouse brains down to 500 µm depth, we demonstrate substantial improvements in the sensitivity and resolution of structural and functional measurements of synapses in vivo. This enables volumetric measurements of synaptic calcium and glutamate activity at high accuracy, including the simultaneous recording of glutamate activity of apical and basal dendritic spines in the mouse cortex.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document