Rapid measurement of prefrontal cortical activity using parallelized diffuse correlation spectroscopy
Abstract
A central goal in neuroscience has been to understand how the brain supports complex behaviors such as planning, reasoning and decision-making. It is well-established that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays a major role in such behaviors. However, a detailed understanding of its functional organization still remains one of the most important unsolved problems in neuroscience, in part due to our limited ability to spatially resolve neural activity at high speed across interconnected brain regions. The research objective of this proposal is to improve our understanding of the human PFC by establishing how two key regions – the dorsomedial PFC (dmPFC) and dorsolateral PFC (dlPFC) – interact to shape our moment-to-moment behavior. We will use a new technology for non-invasive measurement of brain activity, termed parallelized diffuse correlation spectroscopy (PaDS), to simultaneously probe both the dmPFC and dlPFC at high speed during specific behavioral tasks. We will first perform a series of neuroimaging experiments using PaDS and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to confirm PaDS measurement accuracy and establish its temporal characteristics. Then, we will use PaDS to spatiotemporally resolve activity within the dlPFC and dmPFC. By processing data acquired from 20 participants during tasks designed to challenge prefrontal function, we aim to establish whether dmPFC contains signals consistent with a control system that engages the dlPFC. The anticipated outcomes of this proposal are a new set of experimental data that describes the functional connectivity of the dmPFC and dlPFC with high temporal resolution, along with a careful assessment of a new compact and portable technology for non-invasive measurement of human neural activity. Our experimental findings will help answer key unknown questions regarding the functional organization of the human FPC and will point towards a new effective technology for functional neuroimaging measurements.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Mar 07, 2023
- Source ID
- FA95502110401
Entities
People
- Roarke Horstmeyer
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Duke University
- United States Air Force