Human Brain Mapping Using Event-Related fMRI

Current tomographic technologies in medical imaging enable noninvasive studies of brain function. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain is typically based on blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) contrast mechanisms and produces images that reflect neuronal responses to sensory stimuli or cognitive tasks. Event-related fMRI (ER-fMRI) is a technique for detection of neurovascular responses to very brief, randomly intermixed, stimuli. Since most image data analysis will follow the same pre-processing path. The steps of pre-processing will be reviewed in a general way in the first place, after that we will focus on a well designed event-related experiment, which is about word vs. non-word discrimination task, to discuss the methods to estimate the signal descriptions of the response.