Imaging Cerebellum Activity in Real Time with Magnetoencephalographic Data

The cerebellum has traditionally been associated with motor movements but recent studies suggest its involvement with fine timing, sensory analysis and cognition. Much of the new data comes from neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI and PET, which have high spatial resolution and show that for even simple stimuli many cerebellar and cortical areas are involved. We use examples from recent studies to demonstrate that magnetic field tomography (MFT) offers a new and powerful tool for studying cerebellar function through real time localization of cortical, brainstem and cerebellar activations over timescales ranging from a fraction of a millisecond to seconds, minutes and hours. The examples include demonstration of cerebellar activations along well-established anatomical pathways during saccades and the visualization of the ascending medullar volley after median nerve stimulation. MFT analysis of single trial MEG signals elicited by the presentation of faces in emotion and object recognition tasks, show changes in cerebellar activation between schizophrenics and normal subjects in agreement with proposals for disturbed cerebellar function in schizophrenia. The ability of MFT to identify cerebellar, brainstem and cortical activations in real time can add new insights about dynamics of brain activity to the recent findings about cerebellar function from PET and fMRI.