Functional Imaging Advances
Advance in neuroimaging are always exciting as they assist doctors and clinicians in treating patients with traumatic brain injury. 
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a technique widely used in studying the human brain. However, it has long been unclear exactly how fMRI signals are generated at brain cell level. This information is crucially important to interpreting these imaging signals. Scientists from the Academy of Finland's Neuroscience Research Programme (NEURO) have discovered that astrocytes, support cells in brain tissue, play a key role in the generation of fMRI signals.
Functional magnetic imaging has become a highly popular method in basic neurobiological research, psychology, medicine as well as in areas of study that interface with the social sciences and economics, such as neuroeconomics. fMRI imaging does not directly measure the activity of nerve cells or neural networks, but local changes in cerebrovascular circulation during the execution of certain functions. Interpretation of the measurement data obtained with this method therefore requires a close knowledge of the cell-level mechanisms that are responsible for these local changes in cerebrovascular circulation.
Read morehere.
