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Vascular effects of caffeine found in BOLD fMRI
Author(s) -
Yang HoChing Shawn,
Liang Zhenhu,
Yao Jinxia Fiona,
Shen Xin,
Frederick Blaise deB.,
Tong Yunjie
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of neuroscience research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.72
H-Index - 160
eISSN - 1097-4547
pISSN - 0360-4012
DOI - 10.1002/jnr.24360
Subject(s) - functional magnetic resonance imaging , blood oxygen level dependent , voxel , neuroscience , cerebral blood flow , resting state fmri , premovement neuronal activity , brain activity and meditation , magnetic resonance imaging , perfusion , vasoconstriction , caffeine , psychology , medicine , electroencephalography , cardiology , radiology
The blood oxygen level‐dependent (BOLD) signal in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures neuronal activation indirectly. Previous studies have found aperiodic, systemic low‐frequency oscillations (sLFOs, ~0.1 Hz) in BOLD signals from resting state (RS) fMRI, which reflects the non‐neuronal cerebral perfusion information. In this study, we investigated the possibility of extracting vascular information from the sLFOs in RS BOLD fMRI, which could provide complementary information to the neuronal activations. Two features of BOLD signals were exploited. First, time delays between the sLFOs of big blood vessels and brain voxels were calculated to determine cerebral circulation times and blood arrival times. Second, voxel‐wise standard deviations ( SD ) of LFOs were calculated to represent the blood densities. We explored those features on the publicly available Myconnectome data set (a 2‐year study of an individual subject (Male)), which contains 45 RS scans acquired after the subject had coffee, and 45 coffee‐free RS scans, acquired on different days. Our results showed that shorter time delays and smaller SD s were detected in caffeinated scans. This is consistent with the vasoconstriction effects of caffeine, which leads to increased blood flow velocity. We also compared our results with previous findings on neuronal networks from the same data set. Our finding showed that brain regions with the significant vascular effect of caffeine coincide with those with a significant neuronal effect, indicating close interaction. This study provides methods to assess the physiological information from RS fMRI. Together with the neuronal information, we can study simultaneously the underlying correlations and interactions between vascular and neuronal networks, especially in pharmacological studies.