Pharmacological Functional MRI in Rodent Model

The pharmacological effects on the brain will occur widely in whole brain. Therefore, pharmacological functional MRI (fMRI) is a promising non-invasive tool to investigate the whole brain activation following pharmacological stimulation. The multimodal fMRI techniques, which reflect the vascular response (blood oxygenation level dependent fMRI), neuron/astrocyte activity (diffusion fMRI) and Ca2+ influx in excitatory neurons (manganese enhanced MRI), enable to observe the neuronal activation in rodent model. In the present study, the multimodal pharmacological fMRI method in rodents will be introduced.