Longitudinal, transcranial measurement of functional activation in the rat brain by diffuse correlation spectroscopy

Igor Blanco; Peyman Zirak; Tanja Dragojević; Clara Castellvi; Turgut Durduran; Carles Justicia

doi:10.1117/1.NPh.4.4.045006

5 December 2017 Longitudinal, transcranial measurement of functional activation in the rat brain by diffuse correlation spectroscopy

Igor Blanco, Peyman Zirak, Tanja Dragojević, Clara Castellvi, Turgut Durduran, Carles Justicia

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Neurophotonics, Vol. 4, Issue 4, 045006 (December 2017). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.NPh.4.4.045006

Abstract

Neural activity is an important biomarker for the presence of neurodegenerative diseases, cerebrovascular alterations, and brain trauma; furthermore, it is a surrogate marker for treatment effects. These pathologies may occur and evolve in a long time-period, thus, noninvasive, transcutaneous techniques are necessary to allow a longitudinal follow-up. In the present work, we have customized noninvasive, transcutaneous, diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) to localize changes in cerebral blood flow (CBF) induced by neural activity. We were able to detect changes in CBF in the somatosensory cortex by using a model of electrical forepaw stimulation in rats. The suitability of DCS measurements for longitudinal monitoring was demonstrated by performing multiple sessions with the same animals at different ages (from 6 to 18 months). In addition, functional DCS has been cross-validated by comparison with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in the same animals in a subset of the time-points. The overall results obtained with transcutaneous DCS demonstrates that it can be utilized in longitudinal studies safely and reproducibly to locate changes in CBF induced by neural activity in the small animal brain.

CC BY: © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.

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Igor Blanco, Peyman Zirak, Tanja Dragojević, Clara Castellvi, Turgut Durduran, and Carles Justicia "Longitudinal, transcranial measurement of functional activation in the rat brain by diffuse correlation spectroscopy," Neurophotonics 4(4), 045006 (5 December 2017). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.NPh.4.4.045006

Received: 10 August 2017; Accepted: 9 November 2017; Published: 5 December 2017

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