Questa psicologa prova a spiegare i concetti complessi usando il sushi

di  Martina Rossi |

Ever wonder how researchers get those colorful blobs on brain images? It's usually through a technique called functional neuroimaging. Specifically, many functional neuroimaging studies use functional MRI (fMRI) as the main tool for data collection. . * Our brains have an intricate set up of blood vessels that supply different regions. When a region is engaged in activity, there is a higher need for oxygen at that region. So what happens? Hemoglobin in red blood cells delivers oxygen to those spots through increased blood flow. Because of this, fMRI is fully called “BOLD fMRI,” meaning blood oxygenation level dependent fMRI. * An MRI machine is like a giant, electromagnetic camera (swipe to see what it looks like). The magnetic strength of commonly used machines is about 50,000 times greater than the Earth's magnetic field. In fMRI, the magnet is used to track blood flow across the brain. * Two main kinds of pictures are structural (i.e., what does your brain look like) and functional (i.e., where in your brain is activity happening). The structural images are usually "high resolution," meaning you can see brain structures clearly. . * Functional images are not so clear and are actually purely gray scale in their raw data form (swipe for picture). These gray scaled images are in 4D, meaning they are a 3D representation of the brain over time (the 4th dimension). The gray scale images show signal changes as a result of blood flow over time. . * After data collection is complete, we put raw images through image processing steps that improve the signal we’re interested in over messy background noise. Part of this processing is to align the structural MRI high resolution brain picture to the functional images. * Finally, we align each person’s data to a standard brain template, meaning some parts of the brain have to get slightly stretched or smushed to fit in this template. Once every participant’s data is aligned, we can finally make comparisons across our sample using statistical tests. Results of these statistical tests show up as the colorful blobs that you see!

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