Skip Navigation

CANCELED - Spatiotemporal Regulation of Cerebral Blood Flow

Air date: Friday, October 4, 2013, 12:00:00 PM
Time displayed is Eastern Time, Washington DC Local
Description: Director's Seminar Series

The brain is critically dependent on a continuous blood supply. Vasoactive mechanisms keep a tight relationship between neuronal activity and the hemodynamic regulation of energy reserve and waste removal, named “neurovascular coupling”, to ensure that homeostasis of the delicate cellular environment is maintained at all times. Disruption of these mechanisms causes brain dysfunction and disease. Thus, research on neurovascular coupling is of critical relevance to human health. Additionally, neurovascular coupling forms the basis of functional neuroimaging methods that use changes in cerebral blood flow (CBF) and oxygenation as surrogate markers of neural activity, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and optical imaging of the cerebral microcirculation. Understanding the mechanisms of CBF control is critical to interpreting and applying functional neuroimaging data. A major goal of our lab is to understand how the spatial localization and temporal evolution of CBF relate to the neurovascular organization of the cerebral cortex. My seminar will review data from our lab suggesting that the fundamental spatiotemporal regulation of CBF occurs in intracortical domains due to an active role of cerebral capillaries in determining fast and spatially precise CBF responses to focal brain stimulation. I will show how the hemodynamic regulation occurs at a spatial scale that matches the cytoarchitecture of the cerebral cortex is much finer than the resolution of typical current human fMRI, and how this data can be used to study the functional organization of the brain across different primary senses.
Author: Afonso C. Silva, Ph.D. Chief, Cerebral Microcirculation Unit, NINDS
Runtime: 1 hour