Design And Evaluation Of A Gustometer For FMRI-study

Functional magnetic resonance imaging(f MRI) technology is a new method for studying the human brain functional activities and is usually used as an important method of revealing the relationship between brain and mind, at the same time it plays an important role in analysis of advanced neurophysiological and neuropsychological. There are many domestic and foreign companies who has supplied commercial product. Taste stimulation is still in the theoretical stage and has few related brain research. The main reasons are possible:1) Taste stimulation device called gustatory is constructed by the actual requirements of the lab and experiments. There is no certain standards and technical programs molding;2) The market lacks the dedicated and automated devices to meet the various requirements of f MRI experiments;3) In the gustatory, how to set the amount of liquid and treat the waste liquid is different from experiments. If the liquid is overload or extended delivery, the separated waste treatment is necessary to be built;4) The design patterns of taste f MRI experiments require future study based on the specific experiments.According to the problems in development of taste stimuli, this paper carried out the design and verification of an f MRI gustatory device, and through taste f MRI experiments verified the availability of stimulation design. Specific results are as follows:1) From the already existing,we analyzed and summarized that we can go on the demand analysis from multiple stimulation, a single stimulus, automatic control, image synchronization, electromagnetic compatibility and other aspects. In these requirements, the design of gustatory is presented;2) For this purpose, we have designed and verified a computer-controlled gustatory device for delivering gustatory stimulation in f MRI environment. Host computer, whose interface is written in Lab VIEW, can produce stimulation sequence based on user’s requirements; Slave computer, which is controlled by microcontroller unit, and can deliver precise amounts of liquid; at the same time, our gustatory also consists of the liquid delivery path. Through the data acquisition card, stimulation sequence is sent to the host computer, so that user can quantificationally deliver liquid in real-time;3) We designed and evaluated the gustatory for taste stimulation with six subjects, and then got the activation map of sweet and salt taste and the ROI analysis results from parts of the activated brain regions. In these ways, the gustatory has been verified its usability.