As anesthesia is a serious confounding factor in pre-clinical fMRI, there is increasing interest in awake fMRI. However, awake protocols tend to be time-consuming and laborious, making large studies unfeasible. Therefore, we investigated whether a light sedation protocol with a short habituation period can provide comparable data to fully awake protocol. We measured 102 rats under light sedation and compared the FC to both on-site measured awake data and open awake rat fMRI database. Our results show, that apart from slightly modified thalamic connectivity, light sedation provides results that are comparable to the data obtained in the awake state.
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