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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on July 25, 2008
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhn129
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Transdural Doppler Ultrasonography Monitors Cerebral Blood Flow Changes in Relation to Motor Tasks

Nobuhiko Hatanaka1,2, Hironobu Tokuno1, Atsushi Nambu1,2 and Masahiko Takada1,3

1 Tokyo Metropolitan Institute for Neuroscience, Tokyo Metropolitan Organization for Medical Research, Fuchu, Tokyo 183-8526, Japan, 2 Division of System Neurophysiology, National Institute for Physiological Sciences, and Department of Physiological Sciences, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Okazaki, Aichi 444-8585, Japan, 3 CREST, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Kawaguchi, Saitama 332-0012, Japan

Address correspondence to Nobuhiko Hatanaka, DDS, PhD, Department of System Neurophysiology, National Institute for Physiological Sciences, Okazaki, Aichi 444-8585, Japan. Email: hatanaka{at}nips.ac.jp.

Monitoring changes in cerebral blood flow in association with neuronal activity has widely been used to evaluate various brain functions. However, current techniques do not directly measure blood flow changes in specified blood vessels. The present study identified arterioles within the cerebral cortex by echoencephalography and color Doppler imaging, and then measured blood flow velocity (BFV) changes in pulsed-wave Doppler mode. We applied this "transdural Doppler ultrasonography (TDD)" to examine BFV changes in the cortical motor-related areas of monkeys during the performance of unimanual (right or left) and bimanual key-press tasks. BFV in the primary motor cortex (MI) was increased in response to contralateral movement. In each of the unimanual and bimanual tasks, bimodal BFV increases related to both the instruction signal and the movement were observed in the supplementary motor area (SMA). Such BFV changes in the SMA were prominent during the early stage of task training and gradually decreased with improvements in task performance, leaving those in the MI unchanged. Moreover, BFV changes in the SMA depended on task difficulty. The present results indicate that TDD is useful for evaluating regional brain functions.

Key Words: bimanual movement • functional brain imaging • motor acquisition • primary motor cortex • supplementary motor area


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