Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
5
IMAGING THE NEURAL SYSTEMS FOR
MOTIVATED BEHAVIOR AND
THEIR DYSFUNCTION IN
NEUROPSYCHIATRIC ILLNESS
Hans C. Breiter and Gregory P. Gasic
Departments of Radiology and Psychiatry, Massachusetts
General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston
Nikos Makris
Athinoula Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts
General Hospital, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
and Harvard Medical School, Boston
Tomographic imaging of the human brain has enabled neuroscientists to begin dissection
of the complex distributed neural groups that make up the human brain. Of the available
tomographic technologies, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has emerged
as an important tool for the systems neuroscience of cognitive and emotional functions.
fMRI has also been an important technology in developing evidence for a generalized
circuitry that processes reward/aversion information. Composed of an extended
set of subcortical gray matter regions and the surrounding paralimbic girdle, this re-
ward/aversion circuitry forms the core of an informational backbone for motiva-
tion (iBM) underlying behavior. Differential components of this iBM appear to be
structurally or functionally affected in many neuropsychiatric illnesses. Should some of
these structural and functional alterations in the iBM and connected systems be shown
to be quantitative measures that are inherited versus state-dependent, they would likely
group psychiatric illnesses on a more etiological basis than the diagnostic categories
based on statistical clusters of behaviors and symptoms that are used in current psychiat-
ric diagnosis. This chapter will explore how integrative systems biology approaches can
bridge the distributed neural circuits responsible for the processing of reward/aversion
Address correspondence to: Hans C. Breiter, Athinoula Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging,
Building 149-2301, Thirteenth Street, Charlestown, MA 02129-2060 (hbreiter@partners.org); Greg-
ory P. Gasic (ggasic@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu); Nikos Makris (nikos@cma.mgh.harvard.edu).
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