practiCal fMRI

Might vasculo-neural coupling be the main mechanism behind tFUS neuromodulation? What does AI have to say? practicalfmri.blogspot.com/2026/06/in-j...

The NIH Intramural Summer Internship Program is accepting applications through January 26, 2027. This is an earlier application deadline than previous years. Please share with potentially interested high school, undergrad & grad students. www.training.nih.gov/research-tra...

For an fMRI task, I'm looking for short movie clips of people (ideally single heads) talking and some non-language/person movie clips for contrast. I know things like this exist, but I'm not finding them with a quick search. Extra bonus if it's already part of a PsychoPy script.

Serotonergic psychedelics delay resting state neurovascular coupling dynamics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.09.758082v1

Bingo! (Also, stay tuned for a review on confounding in fMRI.)

When longevity becomes chemistry: Why rodent brains lack neuromelanin https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.13.759023v1

🧠Hypertension changes how brain blood vessels sense mechanical forces. Overactive Piezo1 disrupts cerebral blood flow and cognition, while Piezo1 inhibition reverses these deficits in mice. Congratulations to the team and collaborators! ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/... @ahascience.bsky.social

Been traveling recently, and judging by the number of Lake Ontario hats, tee shirts and hoodies on American pax I'm guess there's one part of US-Canada economy that's still raging. #LakeOntario

Astrocytes Coordinate Neurovascular Coupling During Prolonged Sensory Demand via AQP4/TRPA1/BEST1/D-Serine Signaling pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42811508/

Human brain cortical oxygen consumption is positively related to soma surface area density. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.29.755273v1

Dose-dependent ultrasound neuromodulation of the human brain https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.27.754841v1

Great postdoc opportunity with Peter Bandettini @fmri-today.bsky.social (and me).

Looking forward to seeing who is lucky enough to hire @joetzel.bsky.social

Searching for myself on YouTube is more mixed-content than I expected: Bobbiejo Etzel (no relation) was charged for murder a few years ago. (The www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNbT... link is for my job search; anyone in the EU looking to hire staff (me!) for fMRI/dataset QC/analysis/project management?)

Here is what Sol said when I asked it how it did this 🧵

So… we just found out that GPT sol can complete a complex online behavioral/cognitive study producing nearly indistinguishable behavior and subjective reports… right as we are about to launch. Is this doomsday for online cognitive testing?

Large-Vessel Venous Signal Confounds Apparent Amygdala Activation in BOLD fMRI https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.04.749520v1

Mechanosensation isn't just at the cell surface. In gut smooth muscle, we found that Piezo1 is mostly intracellular, <40 nm from RyR and BK channels. Activating it hyperpolarizes cells and weakens contraction- like a molecular brake. Stay tuned for more to come! J Physiol: doi.org/10.1113/JP29...

These knockout models supposedly eliminate Piezo1 from neurons, but neither paper mentions any possible effects on the considerable Piezo1 in endothelial cells. Anyone able to shed light on potential side effects? Thx! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37098060/ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38748529/

Could this be a big part of the response to tFUS? Piezo1... "... suppresses functional hyperemia." "... activation triggers a mechano-feedback system that promotes blood flow recovery to baseline (whether from somatosensory or hypercapnic stimulation)." pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39375369/

Have you ever felt like something was missing from your #fmri results? Have you been worried about potential reproducibility issues? Well, this new @natmethods.nature.com article with 40+ coauthors shows how the simple change to transparent thresholding helps both. Go Figure! rdcu.be/B4tikBETdQZa

42 new #fmri tutorials to accompany our new book Elements of fMRI, with @fMRIstats. Run code in both #python and #matlab in your browser to explore. 7 sections, from conceptual foundations to machine learning and AI. torwager.github.io/elements-of-...

Evidence for a rod-to-cone lactate shuttle in the mammalian retina https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.21.744797v1

The Unexpected Role of the Endothelial Nitric Oxide Synthase at the Neurovascular Unit: Beyond the Regulation of Cerebral Blood Flow pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39201757/ Another "better late than never," with possible implications for a contribution of vasculo-neural coupling to tFUS activity.

Type-I nNOS neurons orchestrate cortical neural activity and vasomotion pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41217439/ (Better late than never!)

While I’m pondering scanners of the future, what about moving to active chest/cardiac shielding so super fast whole body, symmetric gradients could be used over the head? Asymmetric gradients are so constraining, and loud!

Do you think Siemens, GE or Philips will ever offer a 5 T for advanced neuro? While they might reduce their 7 T sales a bit, surely many research orgs would upgrade from premiere 3 T scanners if the price & specs were right.

Beyond the canonical HRF: Flexible temporal modeling reveals unconstrained BOLD profiles during naturalistic viewing pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42569467/

Denoising the central autonomic network: characterizing processes jointly associated with arousal and non-neuronal physiological artefacts in dynamic fMRI analyses https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.30.741873v1

But pseudo-motion dominates in the phase encoding axis of EPI; that is, a translation. So I've always wondered whether we couldn't use just the three rotations to calculate FD as a better estimate of real head motion instead: practicalfmri.blogspot.com/2024/04/can-... (2/2)

Framewise displacement (FD) uses the three translations & three rotations from volume realignment ("motion correction") to estimate total motion amount, and define high/low movers. In this paper, as in earlier work, a notch filter (~0.3 Hz) tries to deal with pseudo-motion from breathing. (1/2)

The State of Motion: Demographic and representational consequences of motion-based exclusion in fMRI https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.23.739855v1

More evidence of motion as stable trait which biases fMRI group studies.

So the UK gubmint replaced its prime minister for the sake of £45 a year in VAT on electricity and a quid off a bus fare already capped at £3? Seriously? These are the big changes?

Limitations of pupil diameter as a proxy for modes of locus coeruleus activity https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.14.738598v1

The 2026 fMRI Summer Course with @fmri-today.bsky.social has begun and the recordings and slides are shared here: fmrif.nimh.nih.gov/SummerCourse

Optimizing MR-based gaze-decoding for eyes-closed eye-tracking in fMRI https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.07.736972v1

NAA as mitochondrial “sweat” makes sense. It’s localized to neurons & dendrites, and the harder they work the more carbon they need to build synapses.

N-Acetylaspartate Synthesis as a Thermodynamic Relief Mechanism for Mitochondrial Aspartate Aminotransferase https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.29.735215v1

Dr. Tianye Zhai’s careful and exhaustive new paper evaluating the effects of numerous fMRI denoising pipeline components, alone and in combination, just came out in HBM - check it out! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Cell-Type-Specific Bidirectional Modulation of the Cortico-Thalamo-Cortical Sensory Pathway by Transcranial Focused Ultrasound (tFUS) pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42362146/

In-scanner thoughts contribute to resting-state functional connectivity pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42365014/ I've long thought that this is the "elephant in the room" of resting state #fMRI esp. for comparing groups. If two groups think & feel differently in the scanner, of course rsfMRI will differ!

Neuroendocrine influences on dynamic cerebrovascular function and implications for functional MRI https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.06.729907v1

Published today in Nature Communications: our work shows that ultrasound and electric fields can interact in tissue to generate low-frequency electrical stimulation at the ultrasound focus. A possible new mechanism for ultrasound neuromodulation. doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Ultralow frequency vaso-oscillations in human cerebral arteries are independent from Mayer waves https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.09.731141v1

Commentary by Chen, Rosen & Polimeni in the same issue: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is the May cover of NN but it has already been debunked on biorxiv www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Such a clear statement about the ridiculous pace of publishing (not just NN).

Multiplexed magnetic resonance imaging (MRx). www.nature.com/articles/s41... 22 measures incl. T1, T2, main metabolites in 14 min. A technical tour de force, but I'm not sure where/how it will find clinical applications.

A Multi-Channel AM-TMAS Driving System Based on Amplitude-Modulated Sine Waves pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42072199/

BOLD response delays represent local cortical processing pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42015405/