Functional magnetic resonance imaging measures of blood flow patterns in the human auditory cortex in response to sound
Abstract
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) holds exciting potential as a research and clinical tool for exploring the human auditory system. This noninvasive technique allows the measurement of discrete changes in cerebral cortical blood flow in response to sensory stimuli, allowing determination of precise neuroanatomical locations of the underlying brain parenchymal activity. Application of fMRI in auditory research, however, has been limited. One problem is that fMRI utilizing echo-planar imaging technology (EPI) generates intense noise that could potentially affect the results of auditory experiments. Also, issues relating to the reliability of fMRI for listeners with normal hearing need to be resolved before this technique can be used to study listeners with hearing loss. This preliminary study examines the feasibility of using fMRI in auditory research by performing a simple set of experiments to test the reliability of scanning parameters that use a high resolution and high signal-to-noise ratio unlike that presently reported in the literature. We used consonant-vowel (CV) speech stimuli to investigate whether or not we could observe reproducible and consistent changes in cortical blood flow in listeners during a singl...Continue Reading
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