Functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, is a technique for measuring brain activity. It works by detecting the changes in blood oxygenation and flow that occur in response to neural activity – when a brain area is more active it consumes more oxygen and to meet this increased demand blood flow increases to the active area. fMRI can be used to produce activation maps showing which parts of the brain are involved in a particular mental process.

The development of FMRI in the 1990s, generally credited to Seiji Ogawa and Ken Kwong, is the latest in long line of innovations, including positron emission tomography (PET) and near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), which use blood flow and oxygen metabolism to infer brain activity. As a brain imaging technique FMRI has several significant advantages:

1. It is non-invasive and doesn’t involve radiation, making it safe for the subject.

2. It has excellent spatial and good temporal resolution.

3. It is easy for the experimenter to use.

The attractions of FMRI have made it a popular tool for imaging normal brain function – especially for psychologists. Over the last decade it has provided new insight to the investigation of how memories are formed, language, pain, learning and emotion to name but a few areas of research. FMRI is also being applied in clinical and commercial settings.

How Does an fMRI Work?

The cylindrical tube of an MRI scanner houses a very powerful electro-magnet. A typical research scanner has a field strength of 3 teslas (T), about 50,000 times greater than the Earth’s field. The magnetic field inside the scanner affects the magnetic nuclei of atoms. Normally atomic nuclei are randomly oriented but under the influence of a magnetic field the nuclei become aligned with the direction of the field. The stronger the field the greater the degree of alignment. When pointing in the same direction, the tiny magnetic signals from individual nuclei add up coherently resulting in a signal that is large enough to measure. In fMRI it is the magnetic signal from hydrogen nuclei in water (H2O) that is detected.

The key to MRI is that the signal from hydrogen nuclei varies in strength depending on the surroundings. This provides a means of discriminating between gray matter, white matter and cerebral spinal fluid in structural images of the brain.

Oxygen is delivered to neurons by hemoglobin in capillary red blood cells. When neuronal activity increases there is an increased demand for oxygen and the local response is an increase in blood flow to regions of increased neural activity.

Hemoglobin is diamagnetic when oxygenated but paramagnetic when deoxygenated. This difference in magnetic properties leads to small differences in the MR signal of blood depending on the degree of oxygenation. Since blood oxygenation varies according to the levels of neural activity these differences can be used to detect brain activity. This form of MRI is known as blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) imaging.