Multimodal Functional Neuroimaging: Integrating Functional MRI and EEG/MEG

摘要

Noninvasive functional neuroimaging, as an important tool for basic neuroscience research and clinical diagnosis, continues to face the need of improving the spatial and temporal resolution. While existing neuroimaging modalities might approach their limits in imaging capability mostly due to fundamental as well as technical reasons, it becomes increasingly attractive to integrate multiple complementary modalities in an attempt to significantly enhance the spatiotemporal resolution that cannot be achieved by any modality individually. Electrophysiological and hemodynamic/metabolic signals reflect distinct but closely coupled aspects of the underlying neural activity. Combining fMRI and EEG/MEG data allows us to study brain function from different perspectives. In this review, we start with an overview of the physiological origins of EEG/MEG and fMRI, as well as their fundamental biophysics and imaging principles; it is followed by a review of major progresses in understanding and modeling the neurovascular coupling, methodologies for the fMRI-EEG/MEG integration and EEG-fMRI simultaneous recording; finally, important remaining issues and perspectives (including brain connectivity imaging) are summarized.