4 ms·

I totally agree, even more so considering recent advances in real-time fMRI (http://paincenter.stanford.edu/research/rtfmristudy.html http://paincenter.stanford

I totally agree, even more so considering recent advances in real-time fMRI (http://paincenter.stanford.edu/research/rtfmristudy.html http://paincenter.stanford.edu/research/rtfmristudy.html), I also nominate EROS (http://www.answers.com/topic/event-related-optical-signal http://www.answers.com/topic/event-related-optical-signal) as a revolution in the making. I think it will deliver some huge discoveries in the activity of the human cortex.

robg 19y ago
Real-time fMRI isn't that different - you just analyze the data on-line rather than after the scan. The most promise for me is millimeter and millisecond resolution with new scanning and analytic techniques. And that keeps getting better and better. As for EROS (from your link): "Its biggest downside is the inability to detect activity more than a few centimeters deep, but it is a new, relatively inexpensive technique that is not invasive to the test subject." That's a big problem it will need to overcome to compete.
- viergroupie 19y ago
  While RT-fMRI is an incremental technological advance (it's just faster data collection with some spiffy signal processing) it hugely broadens the scope of fMRI's usability. The hemodynamic delays of traditional fMRI are atrocious. For the first time fMRI is giving us access to when brain activity happens, which is nearly as importnat as knowing where. If you look at the biofeedback work being done with RT-fMRI you'll see it's extremely exciting. Also, I don't view the depth restriction of EROS as a very big problem. There are enough mysteries lurking in the top 3 centimeters of your brain to keep academia busy for a hundred years.
  - robg 19y ago
    I don't know about the BOLD delay being "atrocious". We get good temporal resolution and it's getting better and better (hundreds of milliseconds for some paradigms). I agree though - the biofeedback stuff is very exciting. As for below the first few centimeters, that's where the control network is in mid-brain structures. That's kind of important, and if EROS can't penetrate deeper and with precision it's not likely to be widely adopted.
    - viergroupie 19y ago
      I think part of the reason neuro-imaging is so preoccupied with midbrain structures at the moment is because their activity is simpler and easier to correlate to the brain's inputs or outputs. With the huge boost in both spatial and temporal resolution EROS provides we can put more focus where the cognitive action is (the cortex).

robg 19y ago

Real-time fMRI isn't that different - you just analyze the data on-line rather than after the scan. The most promise for me is millimeter and millisecond resolution with new scanning and analytic techniques. And that keeps getting better and better. As for EROS (from your link): "Its biggest downside is the inability to detect activity more than a few centimeters deep, but it is a new, relatively inexpensive technique that is not invasive to the test subject." That's a big problem it will need to overcome to compete.

viergroupie 19y ago
While RT-fMRI is an incremental technological advance (it's just faster data collection with some spiffy signal processing) it hugely broadens the scope of fMRI's usability. The hemodynamic delays of traditional fMRI are atrocious. For the first time fMRI is giving us access to when brain activity happens, which is nearly as importnat as knowing where. If you look at the biofeedback work being done with RT-fMRI you'll see it's extremely exciting. Also, I don't view the depth restriction of EROS as a very big problem. There are enough mysteries lurking in the top 3 centimeters of your brain to keep academia busy for a hundred years.
- robg 19y ago
  I don't know about the BOLD delay being "atrocious". We get good temporal resolution and it's getting better and better (hundreds of milliseconds for some paradigms). I agree though - the biofeedback stuff is very exciting. As for below the first few centimeters, that's where the control network is in mid-brain structures. That's kind of important, and if EROS can't penetrate deeper and with precision it's not likely to be widely adopted.
  - viergroupie 19y ago
    I think part of the reason neuro-imaging is so preoccupied with midbrain structures at the moment is because their activity is simpler and easier to correlate to the brain's inputs or outputs. With the huge boost in both spatial and temporal resolution EROS provides we can put more focus where the cognitive action is (the cortex).