We examined the brain activation induced by a complex ®nger movement task using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with echo planar imaging (EPI). Imaging planes were set up for the observation of non-primary motor areas. Among ®ve normal males examined, four subjects naive to the task showed activations in contralateral primary and supplementary motor areas and the ipsilateral superior anterior part of the cerebellar hemisphere. Also, the bilateral premotor areas and the contralateral ventrolateral nucleus of thalamus were occasionally activated. No changes were observed in the putamen and globus pallidus. The subject accustomed to the task showed activation in the narrow areas of the contralateral primary motor and supplementary motor and premotor areas but not in the cerebellum. These results suggest that fMRI has nearly the same degree of detectability to that of positron emission tomography (PET) in regard to motor functions.

The purpose of this study was to investigate T2 changes in the central nervous system of solvent misusers and to validate a classification of white matter changes (restricted, intermediate and diffuse) proposed in our previous study by visual inspection of magnetic resonance images. T2 values were calculated from the intensity measurements at nine regions in the brain of eight solvent misusers, six of whom showed white matter changes on MRI (two patients for each type), compared with age and gender-matched controls. The misusers with white matter changes on MRI showed significantly prolonged T2 in the centrum semiovale (p= 0.002), periventricular white matter (p= 0.016), internal capsule (p= 0.040), and cerebellar white matter surrounding the dentate nucleus (p= 0.001) and shortened T2 in the thalamus (p= 0.025) compared to controls by ANOVA with post hoc comparison of Scheffe. In addition, each type of white matter changes showed different distribution of T2 changes corresponding to the findings from visual inspection. These results confirmed T2 prolongation in the white matter with T2 shortening in the thalamus of solvent misusers with white matter changes, and provided further support for our classification of white matter changes.