20 years of fMRI

Functional MRI (fMRI) is a technique with 20 years. In medical imaging terms, it is now in its adolescence. To commemorate, the journal Neuroimage published an issue dedicated to this topic. It covers every aspect of fMRI from history, reviews, the future and even tools such as FSL and SPM. There are 100 papers to read!


The article "Twenty years of functional MRI: The science and the stories" is great to read because it takes us for a ride into the first years of fMRI. I put here an interesting example about the first fMRI image: "Belliveau used an approach involving two sequential injections of Gadolinium during time series EPI data collection to create maps of cerebral blood volume before and during visual stimulation. The subtraction of these two blood volume maps (active minus rest) produced the now iconic image on the cover of the November 1, 1991 issue of Science (Belliveau et al., 1991)."

As a still young researcher and not an MRI expert, I enjoyed reading about such details!

I recommend also the article "The future of fMRI in cognitive neuroscience". In this article, the neuroscientist describes the hopes he has for fMRI future and I couldn't agree more, specially with "Methodological rigor" and "Open science and data aggregation".


Links:
Twenty years of functional MRI: The science and the stories
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811912004223
The future of fMRI in cognitive neuroscience
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811911008949

Neuroimage Complete Issue
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/10538119/62/2