Familial Essential Tremor Studied With Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

摘要

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging has become an important analytical tool to study neurodegenerative diseases. We applied the EPI-BOLD functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging technique to acquire functional images of patients with familial essential tremor (FET) disorder and healthy control volunteers, during a motor task activity. Functional and anatomic images were used to produce the brain activation maps of the patients and volunteers. These functional maps of the primary somatosensorial and motor cortexes of patients and control subjects were compared for functional differences per subject. The averaged functional brain images of eight of each case were acquired were, it can be clearly observed the differences in active zones. The results presented in this work show that there are differences in the functional maps during motor task activation between control subjects and FET patients suggesting a cerebral functional reorganization that can be mapped with BOLD-fMRI.