Experimental imaging demonstrates direct detection of neural responses to rhythmic finger-tapping in humans, indicating viable noninvasive detection of brain activity at 3T.
The direct MRI detection of neural activity in humans is a long-sought goal that has been attempted by many. We posit that a key reason for prior failures is inadequate sensitivity. Spectroscopy with linear algebraic modeling (SLAM) is a compartmental imaging method that provides enormous gains in speed and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Here we use it to directly obtain MRI signals from arbitrarily-shaped brain regions with arguably the highest possible SNR efficiency. We successfully detect neural responses elicited by rhythmic finger-tapping at the tapping frequency in humans at 3T, as confirmed by simultaneously-acquired EEG data.
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Zhang et al. (2024) studied this question.
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