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Towards personalized mapping through lumbosacral spinal cord task fMRI
23 Jan 2025
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Research
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#neuroimaging
#fMRI
I am delighted to share our work published in Imaging Neuroscience:
Towards personalized mapping through lumbosacral spinal cord task fMRI
Imaging Neuroscience, Vol. 3 (January 2025)
Sergio Daniel Hernandez-Charpak, Nawal Kinany, Ilaria Ricchi, Raphaëlle Schlienger, Loan Mattera, Roberto Martuzzi, Bruno Nazarian, Robin Demesmaeker, Andreas Rowald, Anne Kavounoudias, Jocelyne Bloch, Grégoire Courtine, Dimitri Van De Ville
This is a project I both led and was deeply involved in across all of its dimensions — from regulatory work and software development to participant recruitment, experiment execution, and data analysis. We developed a dedicated pipeline for BOLD lumbosacral spinal cord fMRI and systematically assessed neural activity across 19 conditions targeting the extensor and flexor muscles of the right leg (ankle, knee, and hip) in 12 healthy participants. The study comprised a total of 220 functional runs spread across four sessions per participant.
Our findings offer a valuable proof-of-concept for the potential of fMRI to map the functional organization of the lumbosacral spinal cord, while also honestly highlighting the significant challenges involved in this process — a contribution we hope will help shape the path forward for the field.
Sergio Daniel Hernandez Charpak is a PhD Computational Scientist, a Physicist and Computing Engineer researching in the interface between AI / medical imaging in healthcare, and also an enthousiast of travel, hiking, chess and piano.