Detecting Acute Cortical Plasticity in Rats using High Field fMRI, Part 1- fMRI Maps & Cytoarchitectonic Boundaries

Carolyn W.-H. Wu^1,2, Artem Goloshevsky^2,3, Alan P. Koretsky²

The sensory maps of the brain are capable of changes throughout life in respond to incoming input activities, thus allowing it to be continuously modified by learning experience. It is well known that long-term denervation causes large-scale anatomical changes. The present study is designed to investigate the acute effect of elimination of input activities following denervation, using high field fMRI and taking averaging of multiple scans to define fMRI boundaries. Consistent with previously reported high-resolution fMRI and electrophysiological experiments, we found denervation causes immediate expansion of neighboring region into the denervated zones. Taking together, these results indicate that high-fields together with multiple-scans averaging can accurately detect subtle modification of cortical maps.