Speaker
Description
Full brain imaging in humans during natural body movements is challenging because most high-resolution imaging modalities (PET, MRI, CT) require participants to lie down motionless, limiting the opportunity to study upright locomotion to that of imagined movement. Because PET imaging involves the injection of a radiotracer for imaging, it has been possible to image full brain activation during movement by imaging tracer accumulation that occurred during continuous locomotion, for example. This type of imaging is very informative as it provides a picture of the brain regions involved in a continuous task that occurred during radiotracer uptake (~ 20 minutes). However, it does not provide temporal or event-related information, crucial to understand the sequence of brain activations necessary to control our movements. I will discuss recent developments in dynamic radiotracer administration, integration of multimodality imaging that could enable the exploration of the neural control of the human during whole-body movements. This potential paradigm-changing advance in brain imaging capacity would be a turning point for fundamental and clinical studies in understanding basic mechanisms, training- or disease-induced changes in brain function during movement. The development of such applications could extend to event-related changes in drug therapy or disease-related symptoms.
