Resting-State Regional Homogeneity Analysis on Real-Time fMRI Emotion Self-Regulation Training

摘要

Real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging neurofeedback (rtfMRI-NF) is biofeedback of realtime fMRI signals for self-regulating brain function. Most studies focus on the task-state rtfMRI-NF for the moment. Furthermore, resting-state analysis brings another angle to explore the neural mechanism of emotion regulation and can be an important way to reflect brain function. Regional homogeneity (ReHo) analysis is a method to study the consistency of the spontaneous neuronal activity between the given voxel and its adjacent voxel in the resting-state. It can reveal the functional and anatomical closely linked neural circuits. In this paper, we designed a rtfMRI-NF experiment for human emotion self-regulation and analyzed brain function after rtfMRI-NF training by ReHo method. In the experiment, the subjects divided into two groups, the experiment and the control group. For the experiment group, through the multivariate voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) calculation of the real-time fMRI system, objects are provided with continuous tracking information display of their emotional state. In the control group, it was the same as that of the experiment group, except for that the feedback value was independent to emotion. We performed the method of ReHo analysis on the resting state data collected from the two groups after the self-regulation tasks, and experiment results showed that there were significantly different between the ReHo maps of the two groups in the temporal lobe, prefrontal cortex, parahippocampal gyrus, and fusiform gyrus. These brain regions were closely related to emotional processing, and the results are consistent with previous studies. Furthermore, ReHo can reflect the characteristic changes of spontaneous neural activity in the brain, it makes another way to help discover the mechanism of neurofeedback, and it can be used as a research direction to assist in the prediction and diagnosis of mental illness.