A Brief History of Arguments in Resting-State Functional Magnetic Resonace Imaging Research

Abstract

All scientific research needs to go through years of arguments and debates to polish itself, including research of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in human brain. fMRI is one of the state-of-the-art noninvasive techniques to investigate brain functions of human and animals. Since it is difficult and hardly practical to record vivo neural activity from human brain, fMRI provides an substitute measurement of neural activity which is based on the haemodynamic response in blood flow during the neural activity, also known as bloodoxygen-level dependent (BOLD) signal [1]. One of the usages for fMRI is to investigate neurophysiological mechanism of human mental or physical behavior, such as detecting the brain areas which related to motor performance by asking participants to mover their body parts inside the MRI scanner [2]. Another usage, which I have been working with for nearly a decade, is restingstate fMRI (rs-fMRI). This approach only need participant to stay in the scanner without doing anything particular. Therefore, the BOLD signal from rs-fMRI reflects intrinsic.