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Is the transfer function between neural and hemodynamic activity at rest modulated by body-specific activity? The case of handedness.

Sofie Van Den Bossche1*, Nigel Colenbier1, Frederik Van De Steen1, Hannes Almgren1 and Daniele Marinazzo1
  • 1 Ghent University, Department of Data Analysis, Belgium

The body-specificity hypothesis (Casasanto, 2011) states that individuals with different physical characteristics, such as left- and right-handers, tend to process the world differently. This has been supported by numerous task-related brain-imaging studies, which show that executing or merely imagining executing an action, activates the left motor cortex in right-handers and the right motor cortex in left-handers (e.g., Willems & Hagoort, 2009). Even so, these studies only provide evidence for body-specific brain activity while performing tasks. Whether body characteristics, such as handedness, also influence spontaneous, intrinsic brain activity remains unclear. Thus, the aim of this study was to examine whether handedness, as expressed by Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (EHI) scores, modulates the shape of the hemodynamic response function (HRF) at rest. To this end, minimally pre-processed resting-state functional MRI data of 343 participants belonging to the Human Connectome Project were selected (Glasser et al., 2013). Further pre-processing included additional spatial smoothing, removal of linear trends, CSF/WM nuisance regression, head motion regression and low-pass temporal filtering. Participants who displayed excessive movement in the scanner (i.e., a mean framewise displacement of 3 SD above the mean) were removed from the analysis. The shape of the resting-state hemodynamic response function was estimated using the blind hemodynamic deconvolution approach developed by Wu and colleagues (2013; see Figure 1 for a schematic overview). The resulting parameters (response height, time to peak and Full Width at Half Maximum) were entered into a voxel-based whole-brain multiple regression analysis. Edinburgh Handedness Inventory scores ranging from -100 (extreme left-handedness) to 100 (extreme right-handedness), were inserted as the covariate of interest. Three covariates of no interest (age, gender and mean framewise displacement) were added as well. Preliminary results revealed a negative correlation between the EHI scores and the height parameter (see Figure 2). For both sessions, a significant cluster was found in the right thalamus, suggesting that the more left-handed participants were according to their EHI scores, the higher their HRF amplitudes in the thalamus of the right hemisphere. For the second session results yielded an additional cluster in the left-postcentral gyrus, which was not found in the first session. Variation between both sessions could be due to a fluctuation in motion artifacts. Further analyses of the rs-fMRI data will include global signal regression.

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Figure 2
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References

Casasanto, D. (2011). Different bodies, different minds: The body specificity of language and thought. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20(6), 378-383.

Glasser, M. F., Sotiropoulos, S. N., Wilson, J. A., Coalson, T. S., Fischl, B., Andersson, J. L., ... Van Essen, D. C. (2013). The minimal preprocessing pipelines for the Human Connectome Project. Neuroimage, 80, 105-124.

Willems, R. M., & Hagoort, P. (2009). Hand preference influences neural correlates of action observation. Brain Research, 1269, 90-104.

Wu, G. R., Deshpande, G., Laureys, S., & Marinazzo, D. (2015). Retrieving the Hemodynamic Response Function in resting state fMRI: Methodology and application. Presented at the 2015 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), pp. 6050–6053.

Wu, G. R., Liao, W., Stramaglia, S., Ding, J. R., Chen, H., & Marinazzo, D. (2013). A blind deconvolution approach to recover effective connectivity brain networks from resting state fMRI data. Medical Image Analysis, 17(3), 365-374.

Keywords: handedness, Resting-state fMRI, BOLD signal, deconvolution, HRF parameters

Conference: 12th National Congress of the Belgian Society for Neuroscience, Gent, Belgium, 22 May - 22 May, 2017.

Presentation Type: Poster Presentation

Topic: Sensory and Motor Systems

Citation: Van Den Bossche S, Colenbier N, Van De Steen F, Almgren H and Marinazzo D (2019). Is the transfer function between neural and hemodynamic activity at rest modulated by body-specific activity? The case of handedness.. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: 12th National Congress of the Belgian Society for Neuroscience. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2017.94.00002

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Received: 02 May 2017; Published Online: 25 Jan 2019.

* Correspondence: PhD. Sofie Van Den Bossche, Ghent University, Department of Data Analysis, Ghent, 9000, Belgium, sofie.vandenbossche@ugent.be