Brain Hack Notes

fNIR: Functional near-infrared spectroscopy

Low cost portable brain mapping. Measure Infrared source-sensor pairs correlations to inverse oxygen concentration and blood flow (hemodynamics) as a approximation of functional MRI. fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) also measure blood oxygen (mainly in the gray matter) while the diffusion MRI (a.k.a., DTI diffusion tensor imaging) portraits in white matter (water pathway).

fMRI detect active regions in gray matter.

dMRI highlight white matter pathways

Pros & Cons:
Pros: cheaper and more portable than fMRI. Non-invasive.
Cons: Variability across different data processing pipelines.
More details in this nature neurophotonics review paper {Link}
Main use case from the speakers is long-term monitoring for inaccessible patients and short-term neural responses.

Subcortical anatonmy

Deep brain stimulation (DBS): classical model has iMSG and dMSG control excitation and surpression. think the indirect message surpress the direct message disrupting the action (motor cortex). DBS insert an electrode to supress indirect message. Use MRI to locate the target region. current interst (zona incerta: uncertain zone). When STN too active, brake too strong, no movement, STN too inertia, parkinson, brake too weak, Huntington Dancing.

Thalamus (丘脑) relay station, STN (subthalamic nucleus) , DBS put a electrode near thalamus. 1.5T regular MRI is not precise enough, they use multi-modal high intensity 7Tesla MRI (Multi-modal here implies T1, T2, R1map scanning resulted MRI images that can jointly help identify certain regions, e.g., zona incerta need R1map).

RSA tool box

https://rsatoolbox.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Can you help me take a note, i have a emergency to go for 30 mins