ABSTRACT
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is today one of the most widely used brain-mapping techniques (Logothetis et al., 2001). However, it has a rather brief history (see Raichle, 2001). Around the time of the 1992 ICP meeting in Brussels, a landmark fMRI paper was presented (Ogawa & Lee, 1990). Four years later, at the time of the ICP meeting in Montreal, a few fMRI papers were to be found in the Medline database (Figure 9.1). During the subsequent 10-year period, spanning the ICP meeting in Stockholm in 2000 and the latest ICP meeting in Beijing in 2004, a dramatic increase in the number of published papers is evident (Figure 9.1). A number of factors may account for this "fMRI explosion", including accessibility (fMRI scanners can be found in numerous sites around the world), cost (compared to positron emission tomography, PET, fMRI studies are less expensive), and non-invasiveness (the commonly studied Blood-Oxygen-Level-Dependent
Figure 9.1 Rapid expansion of publications of fMRI papers according to a Medline search of "fMRI". The time axis indicates the approximate time of organization of various ICP meetings during the relevant time period.
