This book provides an essential overview of the broad range of
functional brain imaging techniques, as well as neuroscientific methods
suitable for various scientific tasks in fundamental and clinical
neuroscience. It also shares information on novel methods in
computational neuroscience, mathematical algorithms, image processing,
and applications to neuroscience.
The mammalian brain is a huge and complex network that consists of
billions of neural and glial cells. Decoding how information is
represented and processed by this neural network requires the ability to
monitor the dynamics of large numbers of neurons at high temporal and
spatial resolution over a large part of the brain. Functional brain
optical imaging has seen more than thirty years of intensive
development. Current light-using methods provide good sensitivity to
functional changes through intrinsic contrast and are rapidly exploiting
the growing availability of exogenous fluorescence probes. In addition,
various types of functional brain optical imaging are now being used to
reveal the brain's microanatomy and physiology.