TDCS guided using fMRI significantly accelerates learning to identify concealed objects.

The accurate identification of obscured and concealed objects in complex environments was an important skill required for survival during human evolution, and is required today for many forms of expertise. Here we used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) guided using neuroimaging to increase learning rate in a novel, minimally guided discovery-learning paradigm. Ninety-six subjects identified threat-related objects concealed in naturalistic virtual surroundings used in real-world training. A variety of brain networks were found using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data collected at different stages of learning, with two of these networks focused in right inferior frontal and right parietal cortex. Anodal 2.0 mA tDCS performed for 30 min over these regions in a series of single-blind, randomized studies resulted in significant improvements in learning and performance compared with 0.1 mA tDCS. This difference in performance increased to a factor of two after a one-hour delay. A dose-response effect of current strength on learning was also found. Taken together, these brain imaging and stimulation studies suggest that right frontal and parietal cortex are involved in learning to identify concealed objects in naturalistic surroundings. Furthermore, they suggest that the application of anodal tDCS over these regions can greatly increase learning, resulting in one of the largest effects on learning yet reported. The methods developed here may be useful to decrease the time required to attain expertise in a variety of settings.

Multimodal Classification of Schizophrenia Patients with MEG and fMRI Data Using Static and Dynamic Connectivity Measures.

Mental disorders like schizophrenia are currently diagnosed by physicians/psychiatrists through clinical assessment and their evaluation of patient's self-reported experiences as the illness emerges. There is great interest in identifying biological markers of prognosis at the onset of illness, rather than relying on the evolution of symptoms across time. Functional network connectivity, which indicates a subject's overall level of "synchronicity" of activity between brain regions, demonstrates promise in providing individual subject predictive power. Many previous studies reported functional connectivity changes during resting-state using only functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Nevertheless, exclusive reliance on fMRI to generate such networks may limit the inference of the underlying dysfunctional connectivity, which is hypothesized to be a factor in patient symptoms, as fMRI measures connectivity via hemodynamics. Therefore, combination of connectivity assessments using fMRI and magnetoencephalography (MEG), which more directly measures neuronal activity, may provide improved classification of schizophrenia than either modality alone. Moreover, recent evidence indicates that metrics of dynamic connectivity may also be critical for understanding pathology in schizophrenia. In this work, we propose a new framework for extraction of important disease related features and classification of patients with schizophrenia based on using both fMRI and MEG to investigate functional network components in the resting state. Results of this study show that the integration of fMRI and MEG provides important information that captures fundamental characteristics of functional network connectivity in schizophrenia and is helpful for prediction of schizophrenia patient group membership. Combined fMRI/MEG methods, using static functional network connectivity analyses, improved classification accuracy relative to use of fMRI or MEG methods alone (by 15 and 12.45%, respectively), while combined fMRI/MEG methods using dynamic functional network connectivity analyses improved classification up to 5.12% relative to use of fMRI alone and up to 17.21% relative to use of MEG alone.

Effective connectivity analysis of fMRI and MEG data collected under identical paradigms.

Estimation of effective connectivity, a measure of the influence among brain regions, can potentially reveal valuable information about organization of brain networks. Effective connectivity is usually evaluated from the functional data of a single modality. In this paper we show why that may lead to incorrect conclusions about effective connectivity. In this paper we use Bayesian networks to estimate connectivity on two different modalities. We analyze structures of estimated effective connectivity networks using aggregate statistics from the field of complex networks. Our study is conducted on functional MRI and magnetoencephalography data collected from the same subjects under identical paradigms. Results showed some similarities but also revealed some striking differences in the conclusions one would make on the fMRI data compared with the MEG data and are strongly supportive of the use of multiple modalities in order to gain a more complete picture of how the brain is organized given the limited information one modality is able to provide.