Transcranial Doppler assessment of cerebral flow velocity during cognitive tasks.

Abstract

Background and Purpose: The purpose of this study was to assess the ability of transcranial Doppler ultrasonography to detect selective circulatory changes during cognitive activity.Methods: We measured cerebral artery flow velocity in 21 normal volunteers by transcranial Doppler ultrasonography during rest followed by cerebral activation. Mean and peak systolic flow velocities of the anterior, middle, and posterior cerebral arteries were measured during the performance of a commercial video game. We also measured flow velocity of the anterior cerebral arteries in 18 subjects during a mental arithmetic task. Serial measurements of the right and left sides were made with a headband with two probes.Results: We observed a global increase in the flow velocity above baseline measurements during task performance. During the video game, both middle cerebral arteries (f=2.6,p=0.02 for the left; f=33,p=0.004 for the right) and the left posterior cerebral artery (/=2.2,p=0.004) had selective increase in mean flow velocity compared with the ipsilateral anterior cerebral artery. This selective activation was most prominent in the right middle cerebral artery, which had a greater degree of activation than the right posterior cerebral artery (f=2.8,p=0.013). We did not observe a statistically significant difference between the right and left middle cerebral arteries, but there was a trend toward a greater activation on the right for both the mean velocity (t=1.7, p=0.098) and the peak velocity (f=1.9,p=0.079).Conclusions: Our preliminary investigation suggests that this noninvasive technique has the potential to correlate selective cerebral artery flow dynamics with cognitive activity. (Stroke 1992^23:9-14)

Cerebral lateralization and general intelligence: Gender differences in a transcranial Doppler study

“…Cerebral lateralization could be studied using TCD (Bulla-Hellweg, Vollmer, Gö tzen, Skreczek, & Hartje, 1996;Cupini et al, 1996;Droste, Harders, & Rastogi, 1989;Evers, Dannert, Rodding, Rotter, & Ringelstein, 1999;Hartje, Ringelstein, Kistinger, Fabianek, & Willmes, 1994;Kelley et al, 1992;Markus & Boland, 1992;Njemanze, 1991Njemanze, , 1996Njemanze, , 2002Njemanze, , 2004Njemanze, Gomez, & Horenstein, 1992;Rihs, Gutbrod, Steiger, Sturzenegger, & Mattle, 1995;Silvestrini, Troisi, Matteis, Razzano, & Caltagirone, 1994;Varnadore, Roberts, & McKinney, 1997;Vingerhoets & Stroobant, 1999). Studies with TCD have been cross-validated by functional MRI (Schmidt et al, 1999), and reproducibility assessed (Knecht et al, 1998).…”

Contributions to the Development of Objective Techniques for Presence Measurement in Virtual Environments by means of Brain Activity Analysis

“…The most similar study can be found in a research from Kelley et al [175], who analyzed brain activity using TCD while participants played a commercial video game using a joystick. Although a video game is not VR, at least it has some of the characteristics that VEs have, mainly, the engagement and the interaction with a computer generated world.…”

“…These values are then compared to check if there are significant differences between them. This analysis has been used in some of the previous studies [175,163,182,35].…”

“…These values can be used to analyze global differences in BFV between vessels (PCA-R vs. PCA-L) and between periods (repose vs. activation), as in previous studies [175,153,160,176,165].…”

“…• Several studies have proven that these variables do not significantly change while performing cognitive tasks in psychophysiological experiments [207,175,182].…”