Concept
Neuroimaging
Overview
Neuroimaging is the use of quantitative (computational) techniques to study the structure and function of the central nervous system, developed as an objective way of scientifically studying the healthy human brain in a non-invasive manner. Increasingly it is also being used for quantitative research studies of brain disease and psychiatric illness. Neuroimaging is highly multidisciplinary involving neuroscience, computer science, psychology and statistics, and is not a medical specialty.
Neuroimaging is sometimes confused with neuroradiology. Neuroradiology is a medical specialty that uses non-statistical brain imaging in a clinical setting, practiced by radiologists who are medical practitioners. Neuroradiology primarily focuses on recognizing brain lesions, such as vascular diseases, strokes, tumors, and inflammatory diseases. In contrast to neuroimaging, neuroradiology is qualitative (based on subjective impressions and extensive clinical training) but sometimes uses basic quantitative methods. Functional brain imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), are common in neuroimaging but rarely used in neuroradiology.
Neuroimaging falls into two broad categories: structural and functional neuroimaging. Structural neuroimaging is used to quantify and provide detailed images of brain anatomy such as structural MRI, and voxel-based morphometry. Functional neuroimaging is used to study brain function, often using fMRI, positron emission tomography (PET), and magnetoencephalography (MEG).
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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They do not apply to relations _between_ these operations and "reality"; nor to "reality" itself. Formal identity and non-contradiction signify, in experimental logic, the complete correlativity of data and hypothesis. They mean that _in_ the logical procedure data must not be shifted without a corresponding change in the hypothesis and conversely.
John Dewey, Creative Intelligence
States what Neuroimaging is.
We might therefore conclude that an image is an occurrence having the quality associated with stimulation by some sense-organ, but not due to such stimulation. In human beings, images seem to depend upon past experience, but perhaps in more instinctive animals they are partly due to innate cerebral mechanisms. In any case dependence upon experience is not the mark by which they are to be defined.
Bertrand Russell, Philosophy
States what Neuroimaging is.
As a violin string or a harpsichord key vibrates and gives forth sound, so the cerebral fibres, struck by waves of sound, are stimulated to render or repeat the words that strike them. And as the structure of the brain is such that when eyes well formed for seeing, have once perceived the image of objects, the brain can not help seeing their images and their differences, so when the signs of these…
Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine
States what Neuroimaging is.
Related ideas
Place in the tradition
Part of Aesthetics.