Cerebral metabolism and functional small-animal-imaging

Our behaviour is the visible expression of the (normally) invisible activity of complex ensembles of billions of nerve cells. If we want to understand these patterns of neural activity – including learning–induced changes or disease-induced alterations -, we have to find ways to visualize the patterns. In animal experiments the range of methods that can be applied is substantially larger than in humans.

In our group we are mainly interested in mapping, in behaving animals, global brain-wide spatial patterns of neural activity at the regional as well as at the cellular level. To this end we make use of the coupling of neural activity to blood flow and metabolism, especially to potassium-turnover. We study cerebral metabolism by injecting radioactively labelled compounds the distribution of which we image using emission-computed tomography (SPECT and PET). We also use non-radioactive compounds that can be detected at the light- and electron microscopical level. These methods that in part have been developed by our group have also proven very useful for studying alterations in cerebral metabolism and network activity in animal models of neurodegenerative diseases.