Showing papers by "Scott Peltier published in 2005"

Functional connectivity changes with concentration of sevoflurane anesthesia

Abstract: Low-frequency oscillations (<0.08 Hz) have been detected in functional magnetic resonance imaging studies, and appear to be synchronized between functionally related areas. The effect of anesthetic agents on cortical activity is not completely characterized. This study assessed the effect of anesthesia on the temporal relations in activity in the motor cortices. Resting-state magnetic resonance data were acquired on six volunteers under different anesthetic states (using 0.0%, 2.0% and 1.0% stable end-tidal sevoflurane). Across all volunteers, the number of significant voxels (p<2.5 x 10) in the functional connectivity maps was reduced by 78% for light anesthesia and by 98% for deep anesthesia, compared with the awake state. Additionally, significant correlations in the connectivity maps were bilateral in the awake state but unilateral in the light anesthesia state.

Attenuated brain response to auditory word stimulation with sevoflurane: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study in humans.

Abstract: BACKGROUND Functional magnetic resonance imaging offers a compelling, new perspective on altered brain function but is sparsely used in studies of anesthetic effect. To examine effects on verbal memory encoding, the authors imaged human brain response to auditory word stimulation using functional magnetic resonance imaging at different concentrations of an agent not previously studied, and tested memory after recovery. METHODS Six male volunteers were studied breathing 0.0, 2.0, and 1.0% end-tidal sevoflurane (awake, deep, and light states, respectively) via laryngeal mask. In each condition, they heard 15 two-syllable English nouns via closed headphones. Each word was repeated 15 times (1/s), followed by 15 s of rest. Blood oxygenation level-dependent brain activations during blocks of stimulation versus rest were assessed with a 3-T Siemens Trio scanner and a 20-voxel spatial extent threshold. Memory was tested approximately 1.5 h after recovery with an auditory recognition task (chance performance = 33% correct). RESULTS Scans showed widespread activations (P < 0.005, uncorrected) in the awake state, including bilateral superior temporal, frontal, and parietal cortex, right occipital cortex, bilateral thalamus, striatum, hippocampus, and cerebellum; more limited activations in the light state (bilateral superior temporal gyrus, right thalamus, bilateral parietal cortex, left frontal cortex, and right occipital cortex); and no significant auditory-related activation in the deep state. During recognition testing, subjects correctly selected 77 +/- 12% of words presented while they were awake as "old," versus 32 +/- 15 and 42 +/- 8% (P < 0.01) correct for the light and deep stages, respectively. CONCLUSIONS Sevoflurane induces dose-dependent suppression of auditory blood oxygenation level-dependent signals, which likely limits the ability of words to be processed during anesthesia and compromises memory.

Short-term visual deprivation alters neural processing of tactile form.

Abstract: Blindness is known to alter the responsiveness of visual cortex. Recently, reversible visual deprivation by blindfolding has been shown to affect non-visual abilities as well as visual cortical function. Here we investigated the effect of 2 h of blindfolding on cerebral cortical activation patterns during tactile form perception, using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Two form tasks were used, one requiring discrimination of global stimulus form and the other, detection of a gap in a bar. Blindfolded subjects showed significant deactivation during these tasks in regions that are intermediate in the hierarchy of visual shape processing: probable V3A and ventral intraparietal sulcus (vIPS). These regions lacked signal changes in controls. There were also task-specific increases in activation in blindfolded relative to control subjects, favoring the form over the gap task, along the IPS and in regions of frontal and temporal cortex. We also found alterations of functional connectivity that corresponded to the activity differences, with the emergence of correlated activity between the vIPS and V3A in blindfolded subjects. We conclude that blindfolding sighted individuals for a 2-h period induces significant changes in the neural processing of tactile form, probably reflecting short-term neural plasticity.

Spatial embedding of fMRI for investigating local coupling in human brain

Abstract: In this paper, we have investigated local spatial couplings in the human brain by applying nonlinear dynamical techniques on fMRI data. We have recorded BOLD-contrast echo-planar fMRI data along with high-resolution T1-weighted anatomical images from the resting brain of healthy human subjects and performed physiological correction on the functional data. The corrected data from resting subjects is spatially embedded into its phase space and the largest Lyapunov exponent of the resulting attractor is calculated and whole slice maps are obtained. In addition, we segment the high-resolution anatomical image and obtain a down sampled mask corresponding to gray and white matter, which is used to obtain mean indices of the exponents for both the tissues separately. The results show the existence of local couplings, its tissue specificity (more local coupling in gray matter than white matter) and dependence on the size of the neighborhood (larger the neighborhood, lesser the coupling). We believe that these techniques capture the information of a nonlinear and evolving system like the brain that may not be evident from static linear methods. The results show that there is evidence of spatio-temporal chaos in the brain, which is a significant finding hitherto not reported in literature to the best of our knowledge. We try to interpret our results from healthy resting subjects based on our knowledge of the native low frequency fluctuations in the resting brain and obtain a better understanding of the local spatial behavior of fMRI. This exploratory study has demonstrated the utility of nonlinear dynamical techniques like spatial embedding in analyzing fMRI data to gain meaningful insights into the working of human brain.