Trimodal brain imaging may accurately detect human brain activities

Parnad Basu, Amity University Kolkata

The brain is the most complex part of the human body and controls what we do or feel, our reflexes, emotions, everything. However, we don’t know our brains fully. Scientists are continuously trying to decode how the human brain functions, pinpointing where, when, and how things happen in the brain.

There are three different kinds of brain imaging techniques that can pinpoint the location of the brain when it gives us any signal.

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures brain activity by detecting oxygenation signals. Which makes it slow even though fMRI can tell us where things are happening precisely.
• The next brain signal imaging technique is Electroencephalogram (EEG) which works by picking electrical abnormalities of our brain. EEG can precisely tell us when things are happening but is less precise about where it is happening.
• EROS (event-related optical signal) also tells us about the time of the brain response rather than where it is happening.

The recent study:

Recently a group of scientists was successful at combining all three types of brain imaging techniques which ultimately boosts accuracy and precision. This was a very difficult job. As there were a lot of electrodes and sensors to be placed on to the limited area of the scalp. For this trimodal experiment, a total of 13 participants were involved among which 7 were female. Of those 13 participants, 8 were involved in the trimodal sessions, 2 in the fMRI-ERP sessions, and 3 in EROS-ERP sessions. All the participants underwent an ‘emotional oddball’ task. In which they had to detect ‘oddball’ target stimuli among a string of standard and distractor stimuli.

The results obtained:

The results found in the trimodal brain imaging were exceptional. The trimodal brain imaging participants showed 94.76% of mean accuracy in response to targets. And more than 95% in the case of distractor and standard conditions. This high accuracy of trimodal brain imaging captured the expected prefrontal and parietal cortical responses. These responses were consistent with the unimodal recording of spatial and temporal response evidence. The results also show that in response to targets and emotional distracters.

The fMRI data captured expected dorso-ventral spatial dissociations in the PFC effectively. It also goes on to show that, EROS identified spatial effects that were similar to the fMRI. But was similar to the ERP (event-related potential) at a temporal resolution. This confirms the temporal modulation at parietal but not frontal locations. The trimodal brain imaging technique achieved what those three techniques individually couldn’t.

Significance of the study:

Trimodal imaging provides some advantages like overcoming the bimodal or unimodal brain imaging, clarifying the link between brain activity and individual measures. This technique will be very useful in the future for comprehensive studies because of its high precision and accuracy.

Conclusion:

However, the trimodal brain imaging technique is very challenging as the optical and electrode arrays had to be minutely configured. Even in this experiment, one out of the 8 participants didn’t show the expected result since the configuration was unjust. Even then the experiment showed that using fMRI, EROS, and ERP we can capture the dorso-ventral spatial dissociations. Which is similar to that of fMRI but at a much higher temporal resolution.

Also read: Increased Omega-3 consumption linked to cardio-protection

Reference:

1. Moore, M., Maclin, E. L., Iordan, A. D., Katsumi, Y., Larsen, R. J., Bagshaw, A. P., Mayhew, S., Shafer, A. T., Sutton, B. P., Fabiani, M., Gratton, G., & Dolcos, F. (2021). proof‐of‐concept evidence for trimodal simultaneous investigation of human brain function. Human Brain Mapping, hbm.25541. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.25541

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