Functional Brain Imaging: A Comprehensive Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews various functional brain imaging modalities, emphasizing fMRI and optical imaging, highlighting their roles in understanding brain activity beyond structural data.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of functional brain imaging techniques, including recent advances in optical imaging, for researchers and engineers.

Findings

fMRI is the most widely used functional imaging modality.

Optical imaging offers novel insights into brain activity.

Functional imaging complements structural brain data.

Abstract

Functional brain imaging allows measuring dynamic functionality in all brain regions. It is broadly used in clinical cognitive neuroscience as, well as in research. It will allow the observation of neural activities in the brain simultaneously. From the beginning when functional brain imaging was initiated by the mapping of brain functions proposed by phrenologists, many scientists were asking why we need to image brain functionality since we have already structural information. Simply, their important question was including a great answer. Functional information of the human brain would definitely complement structural information, helping to have a better understanding of what is happening in the brain. This paper, which could be useful to those who have an interest in functional brain imaging, such as engineers, will present a quick review of modalities used in functional brain imaging. We will concentrate on the most used techniques in functional imaging which are functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and functional optical imaging, which is one of novelties in this area of study.