Hyung Joong Kim1, Zijun Meng1, Saurav ZK Sajib1, Woo Chul Jeong1, Young Tae Kim1, Rosalind J. Sadleir2, Eung Je Woo1
1Biomedical Engineering, Kyung Hee University, Yongin, Gyeonggi, Korea, Republic of; 2University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, United States
Imaging of cell membrane conductivity change may provide a truly direct method of locating neural activity compared to fMRI. The advantage of MREIT as a basis for direct neural activity imaging is that the imaged quantity, membrane conductivity, is a scalar and therefore is not subject to cancellation errors such as those inherent in neural current imaging techniques. In this work, we use a realistic head model to compute signal levels produced as a consequence of a predicted 5% conductivity change occurring within gray matter. We reconstructed conductivity images, showing that these small conductivity differences can be detected and imaged.