Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Imaging Neural Activity in the Human Brain The Annual Progress.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine Volume 2012, Article ID 613465, 9 pages doi:10.1155/2012/613465 Review Article Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Imaging Neural Activity in the Human Brain: The Annual Progress Shengyong Chen1 and Xiaoli Li2 1 College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou 310023, China 2 National Key Laboratory of Cognitve Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China Correspondence should be addressed to Shengyong Chen, sy@ Received 29 September 2011; Accepted 25 October 2011 Academic Editor: Carlo Cattani Copyright © 2012 S. Chen and X. Li. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is recently developed and applied to measure the hemodynamic response related to neural activity. The fMRI can not only noninvasively record brain signals without risks of ionising radiation inherent in other scanning methods, such as CT or PET scans, but also record signal from all regions of the brain, unlike EEG/MEG which are biased towards the cortical surface. This paper introduces the fundamental principles and summarizes the research progress of the last year for imaging neural activity in the human brain. Aims of functional analysis of neural activity from fMRI include biological findings, functional connectivity, vision and hearing research, emotional research, neurosurgical planning, pain management, and many others. Besides formulations and basic processing methods, models and strategies of processing technology are introduced,