Magnetic resonance imaging of neuronal and glial swelling as an indicator of function in cerebral tissue slices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Here we demonstrate a new basis of signal change in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) related to neuronal function, independent of blood oxygenation or flow. Time series MRI data acquired from living, superfused brain slices of adult rats revealed that the signal intensity reversibly increased with depolarization evoked by briefly elevating extracellular K(+). This was presumably a consequence of increased tissue water in the intracellular compartment. Reversible increases in light transmittance (LT) demonstrating a similar time course in response to K(+) elevation supported cellular swelling as generating the MRI signal intensity changes. This was confirmed by reversibly swelling cells in the slice under hypoosmotic challenge, which increased both MRI and LT signals with an identical time course. Conversely, shrinking cells under hyperosmotic challenge reversibly decreased the MRI and LT signals. We propose that specific MRI of neuronal function (fMRI) signals detected under identical parameters during predominantly proton-density-weighted fMRI of the spinal cord can now be explained by neuronal and glial swelling in activated central nervous system (CNS) regions. These observations demonstrate the biophysical basis of the fMRI contrast mechanism that has been termed "signal enhancement by extravascular water protons," or SEEP.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".