Ultra-fast fMRI and fMRI-EEG methods for mapping hemodynamic and neuronal brain repsonses to naturalistic stimuli

This grant aims at developing a fast magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and simultaneous electroencephalography (EEG)-fMRI methods to measure human brain responses when complex audiovisual stimuli, e.g., movies, are presented. Specifically, our method will have sensitivity to measure the whole brain responses at the rate of 10 volumes per second. We will use this imaging method to study the relationship between neuronal activity and local blood responses and the 'compassion' among people watching the same movie. We expect that our method will outperform traditional approach because 1) our fMRI method has a faster sampling rate and thus more useful data can be measured, 2) the noise originating from heartbeating and breathing can be filtered easily, and 3) our fMRI method needs only a fractional of a second to measure fMRI signal. Thus EEG can be measured inside an MRI scanner without strong artifacts from MRI for most of the time (>95% of the measurement interval).