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. 2013 Dec 4;8(12):e81698.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0081698. eCollection 2013.

Replicability and heterogeneity of awake unrestrained canine FMRI responses

Gregory S Berns  1 , Andrew Brooks, Mark Spivak
Affiliations

Replicability and heterogeneity of awake unrestrained canine FMRI responses

Gregory S Berns et al. PLoS One. .

Erratum in

  • PLoS One. 2014;9(5):e98421

Abstract

Previously, we demonstrated the possibility of fMRI in two awake and unrestrained dogs. Here, we determined the replicability and heterogeneity of these results in an additional 11 dogs for a total of 13 subjects. Based on an anatomically placed region-of-interest, we compared the caudate response to a hand signal indicating the imminent availability of a food reward to a hand signal indicating no reward. 8 of 13 dogs had a positive differential caudate response to the signal indicating reward. The mean differential caudate response was 0.09%, which was similar to a comparable human study. These results show that canine fMRI is reliable and can be done with minimal stress to the dogs.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: Mark Spivak is the president of Comprehensive Pet Therapy (CPT). Gregory Berns and Mark Spivak are founding members of Dog Star Technologies, LLC. Neither CPT nor Dog Star Technologies had any role in the funding, design, analysis or interpretation of these studies. This does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Dog participants.
Pearl demonstrates the training device. Kady demonstrates the ear muffs. Caylin is with her chin rest, and Mason is getting his ear muffs wrapped to hold them in place.
Figure 2
Figure 2. Neck coil configuration for canine imaging.
Above: Callie demonstrates the chin rest inside the neck coil. Note the proximity of the upper element to the brain. Below: Kady demonstrates the chin rest placed within the training device that simulates the neck coil.
Figure 3
Figure 3. Structural image of Pearl with EPI comparison (left inset).
A typical T2-weighted structural image with in-plane resolution of 1.5 mm (lower inset: localizer.) Because the phase-encoding direction is right to left, slight motion artifacts (e.g. eye movement) appear in that direction. The caudate is easily identified in the 2nd row, inferior and posterior to the corpus callosum. The EPI image is from the mean of the functionals after motion correction and censoring. The slice shown contains the ventral part of the caudate and corresponds to the adjacent structural image. The internal capsule appears as a “chevron” (green arrow), and two ROIs for the caudate were placed anterior to that but posterior to the olfactory peduncle (red).
Figure 4
Figure 4. Unthresholded t-maps of hand signal for “reward” vs. hand signal for “no reward.”
The slice containing the ventral caudate for each dog is shown with the crosshairs over the area of maximal activation in the vicinity of the caudate. Colorbar indicates t-values.
Figure 5
Figure 5. Comparision of left and right caudate activation.
The differential activity between “reward” hand signal and “no reward” hand signal was generally similar in both the left and right caudate for each dog. One dog (Caylin) was an outlier with deactivation bilaterally. 7 of 12 dogs had positive activations bilaterally, and 9 of 12 dogs had positive activations on at least one side.
Figure 6
Figure 6. Comparison of caudate response in humans and dogs.
The human data is from an instrumental conditioning task. The caudate response is to a visual cue indicating the imminent receipt of fruit juice, to which participants had to press a button to receive the juice . The canine data is in response to the hand signal indicating “reward.” For comparison to each other, both dog and human activations are referenced to an implicit baseline.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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