Distinguishing Nociception from Pain and Hyperalgesia with Percept-Related fMRI

摘要

The advent of functional brain-imaging technologies has given birth to a new era in pain research. The last decade has seen an explosion of pain research using positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). These imaging techniques provide information about brain activity using an indirect measure based on the brain's vascular responses to a stimulus (Berns 1999; Arthurs and Boniface 2002). This research has permitted description of the sites and basic characteristics of cortical activity in response to a noxious stimulus (for reviews see Peyron et al. 2000; Davis 2000a,b).