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Krasnow Institute > Monday Seminars > Abstracts
What further information about human brain function and physiology can we obtain with fMRI? Peter A. Bandettini Chief, Section on Functional Imaging Methods and Director of the Functional MRI Facility, National Institute of Mental Health, NIH. Since the inception of fMRI in 1992, the field has experienced an explosive growth in sophistication and utility. Applications have ranged from mapping the columnar organization in visual cortex, characterizing networks associated with a wide range of cognitive and emotional states, and helping to understand and predict complex behavior such as that involved with decision making. Growth of fMRI is defined by advances in a) basic technology, b) understanding the spatial and temporal relationships between hemodynamic-based fMRI signal and underlying neuronal activity, and c) paradigm, experimental, and processing methodology. In this lecture, I will outline how these three types of advances work together to expand range and depth of information about brain functional and physiology that we can extract using fMRI. Specifically, I will highlight some of the recent advances in my group and elsewhere in high field and high resolution fMRI, characterization of the fMRI signal dynamics, characterization of the so called "resting state" fluctuations and connectivity, applications of fMRI and MEG to understand perceptual decision making processes, and finally, application of multivariate analysis to extract previously overlooked patterns of activation associated with specific stimuli. The ultimate goal of this lecture is to convey a clearer sense not only of the limits and caveats of fMRI but also its still highly significant potential.
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