Feng Liu1,2, Zhishun Wang1,2,
Yunsuo Duan1,2, Fernando Zelaya3, David J. Lythgoe3,
Alayar Kangarlu1,2, Bradley S. Peterson1,2
1Psychiatry, Columbia University, New
York, NY, United States; 2New York State Psychiatric Institute,
New York, NY, United States; 3Institute of Psychiatry, Kings
College London, University of London, London, United Kingdom
Resting-state
networks in the infant brain have been studied recently using BOLD fMRI in
order to better understand the early developmental phase of default mode
network. Perfusion MRI with arterial spin labeling (ASL) has been implemented
to study resting-state functional connectivity in the adult brain. We applied
pulsed ASL on unsedated, sleeping newborns, and studied the static and
dynamic characteristics of cerebral blood flow (CBF) with a method using
high-pass filtering and demodulation. We demonstrated the ability to detect
the functional connectivity using the CBF fluctuation extracted from ASL
signals during the resting state of newborns.