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Brain Energetics and Neuronal Activity: Applications to MRI and Medicine |
| Editor: Robert Shulman (Yale University School of Medicine,USA); Editor: Douglas Rothman (Yale University School of Medicine, USA) |
| Studies of brain metabolism are playing a growing role in neuroscience. Cerebral metabolic pathways date back to the exciting beginnings of physiological chemistry, when Charles Sherrington proposed that ‘the blood supply of any part of the cerebral tissue is varied in accordance with the activity of the chemical changes which underlie the functional activation’. Activities of brain were then to be explained by the same criterion that physiologists were exploring the chemical basis of muscle and heart. Methods for measuring cerebral inputs of glucose and oxygen that have been developed since 1950 have established the basic dependence of cerebral energetics upon the oxidation of glucose. Cerebral blood flow has been measured by similar methods so that neurophysiology has shown that blood flow follows energy consumption and thereby links brain chemistry with the organism.
In more recent years non-invasive methods of nuclear magnetic resonance and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) have played increasingly important roles in brain studies. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has revealed cerebral anatomy with great specificity and has helped to localize the more chemical findings of Positron Emission Tomography (PET), functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), and Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS). These metabolic methods have now been developed to the point that their findings contribute substantially to brain science. | | |
