Detection of time window of cerebral blood flow response induced by sciatic nerve stimulation using temporal clustering analysis

摘要

In many studies on functional neuroimaging, change in local cerebral blood flow (CBF) induced by sensory stimulation is used as a substitutive marker for change in cortical neuronal activity by Roy and Sherrington's postulation. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the close temporal relationship between evoked local CBF and neuronal activity through utilizing temporal clustering analysis (TCA) method to analyze the dataset obtained by high-resolution laser speckle imaging (LSI). We mapped a relatively large somatosensory area of cerebral cortex in successively and followed variations of cerebral blood flow under sciatic nerve stimulation in anesthetized rats using LSI technique. Then we illustrated TCA method on the optical imaging signals and investigated the temporal characteristics of CBF activation. Contralateral somatosensory cortical microflow was activated to increase promptly in less than 1 second after the onset of 2 seconds electrical stimulation (pulse parameters: 0.5ms, 5Hz, 350mV). The data of the present study may possibly shed light on the development question of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) whether the ultimate spatial resolution attainable by fMRI is limited by the physiology of the cerebral blood flow response to activation or by the hardware and signal-to-noise ratio.