Yin Jiang1, Yue Zhang2, Jing Wang2, Jing Fang2, Jisheng Han1, Xiaoping Hu3, Cailian Cui1, Jue Zhang2
1Neuroscience Research Institute and Department of Neurobiology, Peking University, beijing, China; 2Biomedical Engineering, Peking University, beijing, China; 3Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, Atlanta, GA, United States
Acupuncture has been worldwide used to against many disorders. However, the neural mechanism underlying acupuncture is still unclear. Many studies have investigated to the sustained effects using short-time acupuncture (no more than 6 min) for healthy subjects, which may be not long enough to satisfy the treatment effects. This is the first study, to our knowledge, to investigate small-world properties of brain functional networks modulated by long-time acupuncture(30 minutes). A tendency of increasing local efficiency was demonstrated in TEAS(transcutaneous electric acupoint stimulation) when compared with MTEAS(minimal TEAS),which suggest higher fault-tolerance for brain network after long-time acupuncture.