fMRI Beyond the Clinic Will It Ever Be Ready for Prime Time 英文参考文献.docVIP

Feature fMRI Beyond the Clinic: Will It Ever Be Ready for Prime Time? Richard Robinson F unctional magnetic resonance imaging—fMRI—opens a window onto the brain at work. courtroom or the boardroom? Are there neuroethical nightmares just around the corner? Or are all these vivid specters really just idle speculations that will never come to pass? picture element,” or voxel, they can distinguish and make an image of—is currently about 1.5 mm × 1.5 mm × 4 mm, the size of a grain of rice. There are approximately 150,000 of these little volumes in the typical brain, and the immense computers hooked up to the scanners record and integrate signals from all of them. In a typical experiment, a subject, lying still with his head surrounded by the magnet, does nothing for thirty seconds, then performs some task for thirty seconds, then lies still for thirty seconds. For each voxel, the signal during the task is compared to the signal at rest; those areas of the brain with stronger signals during the task are presumed to be processing the information that underlies the performance of the task (Figure 1). According to Joy Hirsch, Director of the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Research Center at Columbia University, fMRI represents a “quantum leap” over any previous technology for imaging the brain. “It enables us for the ?rst time to probe the workings of a normal human brain,” she says. “It’s really opening the black box.” By tracking changes in cerebral blood ?ow as a subject performs a mental task, fMRI shows which brain regions “light up” when making a movement, thinking of a loved one, or telling a lie. Its ability to reveal function, not merely structure, distinguishes fMRI from static neuroimaging techniques such as CT scanning, and its capacity to highlight the neural substrates of decisions, emotions, and deceptions has propelled fMRI into the popular consciousness. Discussions of the future of fMRI have conjured visions of mind-reading devices used everywhere