Abstract #3780

A novel test bed for non-BOLD functional MRI

Ruiliang Bai^1,2, Tim Bellay ³, Andreas Klaus³, Craig Stewart³, Sinisa Pajevic⁴, Uri Nevo⁵, Hellmut Merkle⁶, Dietmar Plenz³, and Peter J Basser¹

¹Section on Quantitative Imaging and Tissue Science, DIBGI, NICHD, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, United States, ²Biophysics Program, Institute for Physical Science and Technology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, United States, ³Section on Critical Brain Dynamics, LSN, NIMH, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, United States, ⁴Mathematical and Statistical Computing Laboratory, Division of Computational Bioscience, Center for Information Technology, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, United States, ⁵Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel, ⁶Laboratory for Functional and Molecular Imaging, NINDS, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, United States

Several fMRI contrast mechanisms have been proposed to measure neuronal activity more directly and accurately than BOLD fMRI. Conclusive findings supporting these non-BOLD fMRI methods have been difficult to obtain, mainly because of the dearth of a reliable and robust test system to vet and validate them. Here we describe the development and testing of a test bed for non-BOLD fMRI, in which calcium fluorescence imaging and MR acquisition can be performed simultaneously on the same organotypic cortical cultures. This experimental design makes it possible to directly correlate any candidate fMRI signal to a robust optical indicator of neuronal activity.

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