Acoustic Effects on fMRI : A Study on Auditory, Motor and Visual cortices

소음이 뇌기능 영상에 미치는 영향 : 청각, 운동, 시각 피질에 관한 연구

MR acoustic sound or noise due to gradient pulsings has been one of the problems in MRI, both in patient scanning as well as in many areas of psychiatric and neuroscience research, such as brain fMRI. Especially in brain fMRI, sound noise is one of the serious noise sources which obscures the small signals obtainable from the subtle changes occurring in oxygenation status in the cortex and blood capillaries. Therefore, we have studied the effects of acoustic or sound noise arising in fMR imaging of the auditory, motor and visual cortices. The results show that the acoustical noise effects on motor and visual responses are opposite. That is, for the motor activity, it shows an increased total motor activation while for the visual stimulation, corresponding (visual) cortical activity has diminished substantially when the subject is exposed to a loud acoustic sound. Although the current observations are preliminary and require more experimental confirmation, it appears that the observed acoustic-noise effects on brain unctions, such as in the motor and visual cortices, are new observations and could have significant consequences in data observation and interpretation in future fMRI studies.