Fig. 9

Comparison of the RAIC BOLD-functional network between pre- and post-SNI. In sub-Figs. a and b, coronal slices of the rat brain are shown from the left side the most caudal level to the most rostral level on the right side. In B, statistical t-maps are shown in 8 consecutive coronal slices, 1 mm each, from the most caudal level (5 mm caudal to the bregma, upper-left corner) to the most rostral (2 mm rostral to the bregma, lower-right). (a) The yellow area shows the seeding ROI at coronal sections “Introduction” mm and 2 mm rostral to the bregma for generating the RAIC functional network in Fig. 9b, which was defined by the brain activity in Fig. 5a within the RAIC area. (b) Comparison map of the RAIC functional network between pre- and post-SNI (warm color: post > pre, cold color: post < pre, significance threshold: P < .02 with cluster size > 23 voxels). To get the comparison map, EPI images acquired within the first 4 min and the final 4 min of the fMRI experiments (Fig. 1a) were used to generate the RAIC functional network maps of the pre- and post-SNI, respectively. These correlation maps were transformed into z-statistical parametric maps for the pair-t test between the pre- and post-SNI. The BOLD-functional connectivity between the contralateral RAIC (yellow in (A)), contralateral S1 (blue arrow), and ipsilateral AIC (green arrow) were enhanced significantly after SNI relative to the pre-SNI baseline. (c) The average BOLD signal time course of the ipsilateral AIC exhibited sustained activity immediately after SNI. The ROI of the ipsilateral AIC was derived from Fig. 9a (green arrows in the insets). The standard errors are shown in light blue. The dashed red line indicates the boundary of |z-score| = 2.33 (P < .01)