Multisensory interplay within human auditory cortex: new evidence from intraoperative optical imaging of intrinsic signal.

Multisensory interplay within human auditory cortex: new evidence from intraoperative optical imaging of intrinsic signal.

World Neurosurg. 2016 Oct 26;:

Authors: Zhou Q, Wang Y, Yi L, Tan Z, Jiang Y

Abstract
BACKGROUND: The primary auditory cortex that was ever considered to be unisensory specific has been recently challenged to be multisensory. However, the temporal details of processing non-auditory stimuli in the human auditory cortex still remain unclear, due to the low temporal and spatial resolution of the adopted imaging techniques.
METHODS: In the present study, using intraoperative optical imaging of intrinsic signals (iOIS) recording techniques, detailed cortical activations within the auditory cortex in response to auditory and somatosensory stimulation were recorded from three intraoperative anesthetized patients with brain tumor located at superior temporal gyrus.
RESULT: At both green-light (545±13 nm) and red-light (610±10 nm) illumination, the primary and secondary auditory cortices showed to be respond significantly to the somatosensory stimulation. As induced by the somatosensory stimulus, the average overlapping rate of the activated region was 74.51% ± 0.15%, and the peak responding time occurred at post-stimulus 7-8 seconds. In addition, there was no significant difference of the peak responding time between auditory and somatosensory stimuli (P<0.01, paired t-test).
CONCLUSION: These findings provide novel evidence for multisensory interplay within human auditory cortex at early stage of cortical processing, which extends the understandings of multisensory mechanism of human brain functions.

PMID: 27794511 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

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