Functional Ultrasound Imaging of Intrinsic Connectivity in the Living Rat Brain with High Spatiotemporal Resolution

Overview

Journal Nat Commun

Specialty Biology

Date 2014 Oct 4

PMID 25277668

Citations 57

Authors

Bruno-Felix Osmanski

Sophie Pezet

Ana Ricobaraza

Zsolt Lenkei

Mickael Tanter

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Long-range coherences in spontaneous brain activity reflect functional connectivity. Here we propose a novel, highly resolved connectivity mapping approach, using ultrafast functional ultrasound (fUS), which enables imaging of cerebral microvascular haemodynamics deep in the anaesthetized rodent brain, through a large thinned-skull cranial window, with pixel dimensions of 100 μm × 100 μm in-plane. The millisecond-range temporal resolution allows unambiguous cancellation of low-frequency cardio-respiratory noise. Both seed-based and singular value decomposition analysis of spatial coherences in the low-frequency (<0.1 Hz) spontaneous fUS signal fluctuations reproducibly report, at different coronal planes, overlapping high-contrast, intrinsic functional connectivity patterns. These patterns are similar to major functional networks described in humans by resting-state fMRI, such as the lateral task-dependent network putatively anticorrelated with the midline default-mode network. These results introduce fUS as a powerful novel neuroimaging method, which could be extended to portable systems for three-dimensional functional connectivity imaging in awake and freely moving rodents.

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