Hello all,
I would like to examine the representation of visceral information in the
brainstem using fMRI, and there are two issues that I am trying to work out.
1. Imaging the brainstem. I would like to use spm99 to analyze the data. Is
it possible to use the pre processing steps in SPM (realignment,
normalization, etc.) given that I will not be doing whole brain imaging.
Are there templates available for the brainstem that would enable me to do
the normalization?
2. Analyses. The goal of the study is to use techniques such as isometric
hand grip which alter heart rate, blood pressure, etc. and to see which
sites (we have specific ones in mind) in the brainstem are activated. I
thought that the best way to do this analysis would be to determine the
time course for one of the physiological variables (ie. record the change
in heart rate throughout the hand grip task), and then to correlate this
time course with the functional data set. Does this sound reasonable?
I would really appreciate any suggestions.
Thank you,
Jane Topolovec
Ph.D. Candidate
Dept. of Anatomy and Cell Biology
University of Western Ontario
London, ON, CANADA
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