Functional magnetic resonance imaging articles from across Nature Portfolio

Hartmann et al. use ultra-high field 7 T fMRI to investigate shared neurobiological mechanisms between Crohn’s disease (CD) and major depressive disorder (MDD). Their findings reveal overlapping abnormalities in brain activity and connectivity, suggesting a neuropsychological link that may inform integrated treatment strategies.

Major depressive disorder (MDD) exhibits sex-specific differences in onset, symptoms and treatment response, yet biomarkers for guiding sex-specific interventions remain unidentified. Here the authors propose the use of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging to uncover sex-based neural differences in MDD, advocating for larger studies to enhance diagnostic tools and personalized treatments.

Meyer-Arndt et al. evaluate fear processing in people with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and anxiety. People with MS and anxiety overgeneralize fear, with a machine learning model trained to associate behavioral to neural fear responses in healthy persons being able to predict behavior from neural responses in people with MS with and without anxiety.

Using evoked and resting-state fMRI, the effects of isolation and enrichment housing on sensory development in male mice were tested. Enrichment improved sensorimotor responses, while isolation impaired network segregation and olfactory function.

This study uses a transgenic mouse line expressing Cre-inducible astro-hM3Dq to study astrocytes’ role in neuroinflammation and cognition without the use of viral transduction, mitigating the potential side effects associated with standard techniques.

The diverse sensory input provided by physically and socially enriched environments is shown in mice to increase sensory integration and responsiveness to environmental stimuli, whereas social isolation produced the opposite effects.

A recent study introduces a neural code conversion method that aligns brain activity across individuals without shared stimuli, using deep neural network-derived features to match stimulus content.

In humans, repulsion effects occur in specific subfields of the hippocampus and are associated with the presence of distinct internal beliefs about highly similar visual inputs.

In neuroscience, numerous complementary techniques have been established to estimate human brain connections in vivo. We have created a tool that aligns complementary views of brain connectivity into a unified latent representation. This tool can then translate among patterns of white matter connectivity and functional coactivation, across myriad estimation techniques, preserving inter-individual variability.